(May 19, 2014 at 1:14 am)max-greece Wrote: Much as I am loathed to say this, but, describing the beginning of the universe in terms of "Let there be light," might not be far off.
That was the Big Bang. There's also the World Egg.
Quote:The world egg, cosmic egg or mundane egg is a mythological motif found in the creation myths of many cultures and civilizations. Typically, the world egg is a beginning of some sort, and the universe or some primordial being comes into existence by "hatching" from the egg, sometimes lain on the primordial waters of the Earth.[1][2]
This idea ended up in Modern Cosmology.
Quote:The concept was resurrected by modern science in the 1930s and explored by theoreticians during the following two decades. The idea comes from a perceived need to reconcile Edwin Hubble's observation of an expanding universe (which was also predicted from Einstein's equations of general relativity by Alexander Friedmann) with the notion that the universe must be eternally old. Current cosmological models maintain that 13.8 billion years ago, the entire mass of the universe was compressed into a gravitational singularity, the so-called cosmic egg, from which it expanded to its current state (following the Big Bang).
Georges Lemaitre proposed in 1927 that the cosmos originated from what he called the primeval atom.
In the late 1940s, George Gamow's assistant cosmological researcher Ralph Alpher, proposed the name ylem for the primordial substance that existed between the big crunch of the previous universe and the big bang of our own universe.[8]
Which just goes to show that old myths can be interpreted to mean anything if you try hard enough.
Where are the snake and mushroom smilies?