Howard Bloom: Let's imagine that you and I are sitting around at an outdoor café table at the beginning of the universe. Sitting here, we're going to watch the Big Bang and watch what happens as the universe unfolds. But before we get to that, there are a few things I need to tell you about, starting with Hegel. In 1837, he wrote an incomprehensible book that almost no one reads called The Philosophy of History. Hegel's message—and it's as applicable in 2004 as it was then—was that history is a process of spirit becoming flesh. History is a process of transubstantiation.

For example, remember geometry? In my geometry class, they gave us four postulates at the beginning of the year, four axioms. They were things like “two parallel lines never meet.” Simple things. And from these four axioms, week after miserable week, by the end of the year, we'd derive the whole euclidean geometry system. In other words, there was an entire two-dimensional and even three-dimensional world implicit in what? In four axioms! That's Hegel's “spirit becoming flesh” in a most remarkable way.

At Reed College, we had a freshman math course based on something similar—Peano's Postulates. They gave you a sheet of mimeograph paper the very first day in class. It had four postulates on it, four axioms—just 165 miserable little words. By the end of the semester, you'd worked out the corollaries coiled in those four initial axioms and you'd come up with the entire mathematical system. Positive numbers, negative numbers, multiplication, division, square roots, rational numbers, irrational numbers—the whole thing. That, to me, was flesh emerging from spirit again.

So there is something about this cosmos that says, in essence: If you start with just a tiny number of rules, and then you work out all the things that are consistent with those rules and you weed out all the things that are inconsistent with those rules, you can unfold a universe. You can unfold all of euclidean geometry in one semester of high school. You can unfold an entire mathematical system in two semesters at Reed College. And if you happen to be a cosmos and you can do your homework in Planck units of time, then you can finish 330,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000 homework assignments in just one second. If you keep that up for fourteen billion years, what do you get? You get a universe! Quite a universe!

Now, if you're fourteen billion years into this process, many of the implications that hovered unrealized like spirit at the beginning have been turned into realities. But an uncountable number of implications of the Big Bang's initial axioms still lie ahead of you. They are still mere hints waiting to be uncovered. It takes the universe a hell of a lot of homework to figure out the next step. The next step has to be consistent with the initial postulates just to flicker into existence. Then it has to duke it out with all the other children, grandchildren, and great-great-grandchildren of those starting postulates if it's going to stick around.

The odd thing is this: all of its competitors are cousins. Everything is a child of the Big Bang. This means that you are a cousin to a nova. You are a cousin to a nebula. You are a cousin to a galaxy. You are a cousin to the stone you trip over. You are a cousin to the animal that wants to eat you. We're all united. Which does not mean we will all survive.

Now for something very strange: This entire planet is inhabited by only one form of life. Why is this peculiar? Because current science says, both in evolutionary theory and in physics, that the universe is random. Quantum physics says the universe is probabilistic. And a clique called the “neo-Darwinians” says that evolution is based on random changes, on random mutations. The mutations that fit stick, and the ones that don't fit, don't stick.

When I worked in the record industry, people went by the philosophy “throw the s--- up against the wall and see what sticks.” If this were really a random universe that uses that philosophy, that just coughs out mutations in totally random ways and lets those that stick, stick, then we might have 38 different life-forms, or 138 life-forms, or 3,800 life-forms, or even 1.3 billion life-forms on this planet. But we only have one. It's the DNA system. The DNA system is the only system of life we've got. Now how's that for random?

So, in the same way that the universe started by working out the implications of its initial set of rules from the initial pin prick of the Big Bang, this planet, for 3.85 billion years, has been working out the implications of a DNA-based system. This means that everything around you, whether it's alive or not, is your cousin. We are all children of the Big Bang, which means that every stone and every volcano that flash-fries us with its lava is our cousin. So if we talk about an environment that's distinct from us, it is an artificial way of hacking things up. The environment is part of the same process we're a part of.

We're all children of the Big Bang, and we're all children of the system of DNA. This means that not only do we have a history in common that goes back fourteen billion years, but we have a future in common that's implicit in us at this very moment. And what that future is depends on how far into the future you want to go. It's a future that's going to get wilder and wilder. One thing that we know about this cosmos is that the cosmos is a wiz at creating astonishing surprises. Astonishing surprises! So with or without us, this universe is going to pop out new things that will blow minds, if there are still minds around to be blown.

And that brings us back to our café table, our coffee table at the beginning of the universe. Let's start with the instant of the Big Bang. All you've got are four forces, and this enormous flash of something called energy. Forces are rules, social rules. Who will be attracted to whom? Who will be repulsed by whom? The four forces are an Emily Post book of etiquette, but for things that don't exist yet. So what does it mean to say there are only four forces and there are no objects of any kind yet? It's sort of meaningless. We're sort of stuck here.

We're also stuck because—what's the dictionary definition of energy? “The ability to do work.” Well, what does that really mean? The ability to move something. But there is nothing. There are no things in this universe yet. Okay. So let's get down to the problems and rules. The universe starts out with this big enormous flash of something we'll call energy. And we're living in Planck time. Do you know what Planck units are? When a little bit of energy emerges from an atom, it doesn't emerge in just any willy-nilly form whatsoever or any willy-nilly size whatsoever. It always comes out in a standard size, like a brick. No one ever thinks about this, but bricks are standardized. They're modular pieces of mud. They're all the same. And the fact that they're all the same makes it possible to build city after city out of bricks. Well, the universe works that way, too, with modular units. And the modular units are Planck units. So if you're an electron, and you're circling in an outer shell around a nucleus, and you drop down a shell, you give off a bit of energy. It's not just any random bit of energy. It is a specific unit of energy called a Planck unit. It's a photon, and it's precisely a Planck unit of energy that you give off.