So here we are, sitting around, and we're measuring things in Planck units. Okay. Something that happens in a second, for us takes an eternity—we get to see this in slow motion. You and I are sitting here and watching this huge flash, this unbelievable flash in slow motion, a flash that will eventually produce an entire universe from a pinprick—which means an awfully, awfully big flash. We're watching this flash together, and you are a dreamer and I am a skeptic, and you say, “Howard, you know, I have this feeling that in, oh, let's say, one to two hundred Planck units from now, all of a sudden, there are going to be these new things called things.” But there never have been things before. There's just been energy. So I say, “You're crazy. I've been sitting around in this universe ever since it started, dozens and dozens of Planck units ago. I know this universe. I know how it behaves. There never have been things and there never will be things.”

And then, suddenly, whammo! These quarks appear in six different forms.

Now, think of this for surprises, okay? We've never had a thing of any kind before. You have made this lunatic, absolutely maniacal prediction, and it has come true. And what's also remarkable about it is that quarks come out in only six different forms, right? We've got something like ten-with-eighty-five-zeroes-after-it number of quarks that have just appeared in the universe, and they're in only six forms! Where the heck does that uniformity come from?

What's the answer? Well, there is no answer yet. I'm working on the aspect of it that I call supersameness and supersimultaneity. That's the question: Why have so many things emerged together with such amazingly precise identicality? It's astonishing, but so far as I can tell, this is a question physicists haven't answered. My hypothesis—the Bloom answer—is that in the first flash of the cosmos you're so close to the initial axioms that your wiggle room is very, very small. Your wiggle room is so small that yes, it will allow you to produce six quarks, and yes, that's a big step up from just four forces, a big jump in the number of forms of processes or things. But sorry, kids. We're still so close to the initial rules that that's as much wiggle room as there is. As a consequence, when you've got things emerging, they're all emerging as an expression of the same rules. They're all pushed forward by the same thing, that operator we call time, the gizmo that moves things forward, that gives you new homework assignments at every step, every Planck step. The combination of the operator and the initial rules is only going to give you a very tiny number of different things, but it will give you huge quantities of duplicates because there was so much energy in what you started with.

Okay. Now, we also start out with another thing that many of my friends in science are only beginning to recognize. And that is that the universe is essentially social. There is nothing, nothing, nothing individual about this universe. There is no such thing as the lone individual anywhere. The four forces are forces of sociality. The four forces are social rules. And those rules say which quarks are going to be allowed to associate with what quarks, and which quarks are going to have to say, “I'm sorry, no. I don't like you. I won't get near you. You get away from me. And I'm going to go away from you.” That's already happening somewhere early in the first second, like in the ten-to-the-minus-thirty-second of a second.

Quarks are social. Quarks cannot exist on their own. So, quarks gang up in groups of three. If two up-quarks merge with one down-quark, that trio is a proton. And if it's the other way around, two down-quarks and an up-quark, it's a neutron. That's it.

We sit around watching these quark threesomes slam into each other and bounce off again for over 300,000 years, and all of a sudden you, the dreamer, come up with another one of your scatterbrained predictions. “These things,” you say, “these protons and neutrons are going to get together with those little things flicking around called electrons.” Now I know you're crazy. So I try to talk some sense into your head. “No, no, no,” I tell you. “You just don't get it. This universe is a high-speed ricochet soup. It's what we call a plasma. Everything is moving so fast that everything is bouncing off of everything else like bullets—bullets slamming at mega-speeds! There's no opportunity for anything to get together. These particles hate each other. Look at them. They're crashing and bashing all the time. And you're telling me these things are going to settle down into some sort of peaceful union with each other? And you're also trying to tell me that a proton, which is 1,842 times the size of an electron, is going to discover that it has a force, a need, a longing that precisely match the need and longing of an electron? And the electron, instead of going in a straight line and doing a head-on crash and then boinging away, is going to slip into a gentle little circle around the proton? And this is going to produce whole new properties that you've never seen and never imagined in your life? And you're going to call it an atom?

“These gang-ups you're predicting just don't square with this universe. They really don't square with the way this universe has been at all. I'm sorry. You're crazy . . . why do I even sit here with you? Why do I indulge a lunatic like you?”

And all of a sudden, whammo! You are proven to be right again. It's me who doesn't get it. I'm still a traditional scientist, saying everything's going to stay the same as it's been. I'll grant you that there can be straight-line predictions from the way things are, but that's it. “There are no surprises in this universe. I know the whole thing.” That's what standard science tends to say these days. Even though we've got this story of an unfolding universe sitting right in front of us, and it's twitching with amazements.

Well, I could go on and on and on, and tell you about surprise after surprise. Even the attractive power of this stuff we call gravity does not appear until roughly 400,000 years after the universe gets started! There's simply nothing big enough to attract anything else with gravity. The first matter of any substance—matter made up of more than one atom getting together—doesn't appear until over 300,000 years after the universe has started. So there are surprises being belched out all the time—galaxies, stars, star-collapses, whole new forms of atoms, planets, atmospheres, and life.

What I've basically been saying is, right now we carry a fourteen-billion-year history within us, a fourteen-billion-year history of surprises. You are a lump of quarks. So am I. Those quarks are joined in atoms. Those atoms are joined in something very complex called molecules. But we also carry fourteen billion years or more of another kind of time within us—future. The future's as real within us as the universe was real in those first tiny axioms of the Big Bang. I'm not predicting that you and I will be around to see that future. But in one form or another, our basic ingredients sure as heck will be.

And we have a unique responsibility. We're among the first batch of quarks we know trying out this new surprise called consciousness. Every new surprise—every new upgrade—is tested. Protons, for example, were tested to the nth degree. They've gone through every kind of catastrophe you can possibly imagine. They've gone through the bashing of the initial high-speed plasma soup. They've gone through the crunch and shattering of dying stars. And they've pulled through it all. Right? They're the ultimate survivors in this universe. But we'll see whether consciousness is able to survive. We will see.

So, we started with Hegel, and with spirit attempting to become flesh. And spirit attempting to become flesh is just another way of saying that the implications of the universe are implicit in you and me. The implications are hovering; they're with us all the time. Sometimes those implications appear in visions. Sometimes they appear in fiction, poetry, and dreams. Many of our former intuitions and our long-gone fantasies have taken flesh as everyday realities. And the implications of this universe contain huge surprises. Like the development of galaxies that are dark. They have no light. They're simply matter that's aggregated, but what a surprising way to aggregate, in huge spiral pools. When you told me there were going to be the first collections of atoms, I didn't believe you. And now you've got these aggregations that are thousands of light-years across, each swirling around its own center of gravity. And I, the skeptic, told you once that gravity was one of your impossible dreams. Well, that kind of thing keeps coming up in the universe all the time. Quarks were once surprises. So were neutrons, protons, atoms, and “things.”

What will happen with our thoughts and feelings? Will we transubstantiate them? Will we be an evolutionary misstep, or will we prove our mettle? Will we seed surprises that defy today's imaginings?