I. In The Beginning...

1. In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. 2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. 3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
The Book of Genesis, Chapter 1 

I thought of many ways of starting this blog but there are no more appropriate words than the ones mentioned above. In just 50 words, the beginning of the Universe and Time is described with a simplicity and accuracy that would challenge any cosmologist of today to say it better. The extraordinary thing is that, after 3500 years since these words were written by a Human, after countless experiments, observations, tests, measurements and other equipment from modern technology, after discussions, formulae, Nobel Prizes, those 50 words are a poetic and at the same time succinct description of the Big Bang. No less extraordinary is the fact that the Human who wrote those words had accumulated a cultural and intellectual legacy through millennia of verbal discussions and speculations to arrive to the conclusion that “darkness was upon the face of the deep”. Some may take away the Human input of these words and attribute them to Divine intervention in a process known as Religion; others will shift these concepts to some sort of extra-terrestrial handover, entering the realms of Science Fiction or even Scientology. I am of the opinion that these words are Man made and as a consequence, pure Science. Ultimately, the way we think, the way we perceive the world, will always lead us towards the same concept, regardless of any amount of Science, History, Time, Geography... we can never get away from the Big Bang.

The reason I attempt to revisit and, in a certain way, rewrite the Big Bang, has to do with a few discussions and observed phenomena in my experience with Photography and Digital Photography. I would have never come across this desire to discuss and to explain what I feel about the subject of Light and the repercussions into the first moments of the Universe, if it was not the constant disagreement with the contributors of the Sigma/Foveon Forum at www.dpreview.com. I will try to explain, rehash, expand on some ideas that I initially stated in my posts in that Forum since August 2003. What I can say is, if it was not for the inception and technology of the Foveon sensor what you are going to read would have never taken place.

Some months ago I was discussing with friends that I had a book in my mind and one day I would have the focus and desire to write it, because I had and still have the conviction of its necessity. I am not writing in a white night frenzy like the genius mathematician Évariste Galois in the hours before his fatal duel, where he wrote page after page of what he considered fundamental mathematical calculations; unfortunatelly he forgot to write his formula to resolve any equation of any power of x because he thought it was too easy and anyone could come up with the result. 

So far no one did.

To reinforce this feeling I saw this Tuesday one of the most important Horizon programmes on BBC2 entitled “Is Everything We Know About The Universe Wrong?” which I recommend viewing (it is shown in full at the bottom of this blog), not only because it explains the actual theory and thoughts about the way Science looks at the Big Bang, but also how uneasy emminent cosmologists are about the actual state of the Standard Model of Cosmology, SMC. This programme has finally triggered these words.


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