April 5th - The Chicken or the Egg?
Q: WHAT CAME FIRST DAD, THE CHICKEN OR THE EGG?
A: In the very beginning, there was just a one-dimensional egg floating in the waves of a quantum vacuum or primordial force. There was no light or sound, only the tide of a vast emptiness. It wasn't the first egg to appear, but it was the first one to survive. It blipped into existence from the friction of the primordial force - an unlikely bunch of tiny quarks all in the same point of space at the exact same time. They formed a hadron egg that hatched into a snake that was as thin as a single line. The force that surrounded this snakelet pushed and pulled on it, stretching it thinner and thinner at both ends. Its tail and head grew further apart, until it wrapped around the entire universe and ran into itself. At that very moment, it became the first shape: A perfect circle. A new dimension was born.
The collision was both destructive and creative since neither had existed before. It was the creation of destruction and the destruction of creation. It was the birth of something entirely new and novel. An array of energy and particles formed from the fusion of the snake swallowing its tail. When the snake first ran into its tail, it had an explosive impact and created more complex particles that it shed like scales.
But nothing stays hungry forever. Ravenous at first, the snake eventually slowed until it ate only the tiniest possible nibbles. Continuously, scales were shed - big at first, but smaller and smaller as it slowed down. These scales drifted through the waves until they too began running into each other. But these were gentle collisions and began to group together to form clouds like dust in the corner of a room. As the clouds grew, they began to draw more and more scales to them until they were larger than worlds. In mirror image to the snake's slowing consumption, the clouds sped up their corporation. Big clouds pulled in smaller clouds and then pushed against each other in a cosmic tug-of-war until one day, the forces were of equal strength. A truce and equilibrium were realized across the whole universe. Being primordial and reptilian, these clouds were animate and began to form their own personalities through a council of composition - a collective entity like you or I. By appearance, they all looked very much alike, but each one had a unique collection of elements.
The first age of the Quixotic and the Pragmatist came to pass. The Quixotic were mostly these celestial busy-body accountants, happy to record everything in the elemental ledger for eternity - chronicling spacetime but not participating very much. They were responsible for defining things in super esoteric and hidden ways, counting molecules by the nebula. As the elements bumped into each other, they took notes but remained isotropically isolated like the royally inbred diamond or the grumpy loner argon. The Pragmatists, on the other hand, were attracted to each other and wanted to form bonds. Some of those bonds were simple and elegant like molecular hydrogen. Others formed whole promiscuous villages of diverse familial bonding with all kinds of positive and negative relationships. Things really started popping off then as the merry-go-round gained momentum. Faster and faster, they started crashing into each other, trading partners whenever there was sufficient force or attraction - many times a day even. They were tireless about bonding. Those Pragmatists got everything so hot and bothered that hydrogen atoms at the center of it all became helium and burst into a plasmatic orgy, while other groups formed rocky or gaseous planets (depending on how far from the star they were in the spin cycle). And that's how we got the solar systems, which are just little parts of galaxies, which are just little parts of the universe.
Meanwhile, our galactic snake is out there shedding scales in the unperceivable 2nd dimension. There are other snakes out there too in other flat planes that either have or will come round to their tails and explode into parallel dimensional universes. But unless we discover wormholes and how to stretch ourselves infinitely, we can't go to other dimensions.
Anyway, nature sure loves metaphors about snakes and eggs.