Life is...

... not too bad when you're off sick and still getting paid * cough, cough * I'll be back in on Monday though * sniff, wipe, type *

read "Sophie's world" by Jostein Gaarder. the thing is Emma...we have no grasp of this. I used to kill myself over such questions...now Ileave it in G's care. You can apply the difficulty of questions like this to the difficultyof life `Once we know that life is difficult - once we truly understand and accept it - then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters.'

...a sojourn in Plato's shadowlands, until we emerge into the light of day

too stressful and busy living in the South East of the UK. "I'm a writer, get me out of here."!

Buddhism puts it simply, Emma, you need 'nothing' to put 'something' in.

is a living hell

oooh Plato eh jude, tres high falutin'. I like that one - is it the cave story.

I wanna be chief shadow translator

...Like waiting for a plane in Grimsby on the way to Utopia. As a great man once wrote God's final message should read....I APOLOGISE FOR THE INCONVENIENCE.

...Life, don't talk to me about life. I hate it. I've had a terrible pain in the diodes down my left side. (Marvin the Paranoid Android). That about says it all really...

"Whats up?" said Arthur. "I don't know" said Marvin, " I've never been there". Priceless.

Tres nice... thank you Flashy. :)

like a bowl of cherries. full of things that give you the pip and over too soon

Full of unhidden delights and miracles that go unnoticed every day..

Life... Yet, never the time for living it seems Delaying the new deferment of dreams Shelving the distant to favour routine Slaves to societies sterile regime Oiling the hours to necessitate gain Whitewashing glances on overrun train A glimpse of the future fragments in time Offices, workloads, consuming sublime Hectic is weekly the weekend exceeds Moments that soar as we clip off our leads Governed by should to the tempo of clock Time pilfering hours from its dutiful flock Hope frozen like icebergs waiting the Spring Wedded to rules occupation the ring Forever on hold as illusion dictates Welded and bolted it leers behind gates Declining the year's, youth dissolves on the bone Proprietors of soul mind and carcass on loan Born then to living we sequence and crave Created, placated from instinct to grave Anyone for base jumping then? [%sig%]

like a cucumber.

Lol! Cheers mate. :)

..obviously looking up for you, Daz. I remember when you used to be a box of washing powder.

is like a box of chocolates............the bastards have only left me the coffee cream.

....a constant train ride from the coast to heaven and hell and back

Life is the name of the game And I wanna play the game with you Life can be terribly tame If you don't play the game with two Yeah life is a go-as-you-please And I need some place to go with you Life can be oh-such-a-tease If you don't play the game with two Remember life's a gamble When choosing partners you should take good care To go on nature's ramble And grab yourself a fair share Wo-oh there's so much there Because the name of the game is life And you may find out some trouble and strife And you can end up taking all the blame Cos the name of the game is life Yeah the name of the game is life The name of the game is life! And I wanna play the game with you "Didn't he do well?"

I was wondering when someone would bring that one up... ;)

A mystery! even when she has been calculated to the nth decimal places and defined in to the perfect unified model of everything. A temptress with a warped senses oh humour. She laughs in the face of a reasonable mind, She's a bitch! and is dam hard to define.

...is what you do everyday. "Living" is what you ought to be doing.

"a rollercoaster, you just gotta ride it... etc"

Marching, burdens, the desert, boredom and anger.

You have a very optimistic outlook Jeff, very nice. I like that. :)

Something to do whilst you wait for death.

a cabaret, old chum, come to the cabaret. *Hurray!*

Full of inexplicable questions... [%sig%]

Is what you make it.

Bizarre. I just watched the news, with the bomb horror in madrid followed by a piece about a man who can make a combine harvester out of modelling balloons.

Life is what happens while you're planning something else

I really love these replies so much tbh... :) Did you ever stop to think that whatever you reply here says quite a bit about your personality? :) So very interesting to see all the different outlooks people have on life. Please, by all means, keep 'em comin'!

:)

Oh look, he's popping the thread to the top again, bless him. Xane - uninteresting mate. Give over will you, it's v annoying.

...a bum when you've got to go to work in the snow.

A sh1t sandwich: the more bread you got, the less sh1t you have to eat.

inexplicable,..I mean, what was there before the big bang, for god's sake? I MUST KNOW NOW

... pain interspersed with moments of incredible joy

Bloody marvellous. Love it.

So we are faced with the problem of what happened beforehand to trigger the big bang. Journalists love to taunt scientists with this question when they complain about the money being spent on science. Actually, the answer (in my opinion) was spotted a long time ago, by one Augustine of Hippo, a Christian saint who lived in the fifth century. In those days before science, cosmology was a branch of theology, and the taunt came not from journalists, but from pagans: "What was God doing before he made the universe?" they asked. "Busy creating Hell for the likes of you!" was the standard reply. But Augustine was more subtle. The world, he claimed, was made "not in time, but simultaneously with time." In other words, the origin of the universe-what we now call the big bang-was not simply the sudden appearance of matter in an eternally preexisting void, but the coming into being of time itself. Time began with the cosmic origin. There was no "before," no endless ocean of time for a god, or a physical process, to wear itself out in infinite preparation. Remarkably, modern science has arrived at more or less the same conclusion as Augustine, based on what we now know about the nature of space, time, and gravitation. It was Albert Einstein who taught us that time and space are not merely an immutable arena in which the great cosmic drama is acted out, but are part of the cast-part of the physical universe. As physical entities, time and space can change- suffer distortions-as a result of gravitational processes. Gravitational theory predicts that under the extreme conditions that prevailed in the early universe, space and time may have been so distorted that there existed a boundary, or "singularity," at which the distortion of space-time was infinite, and therefore through which space and time cannot have continued. Thus, physics predicts that time was indeed bounded in the past as Augustine claimed. It did not stretch back for all eternity. If the big bang was the beginning of time itself, then any discussion about what happened before the big bang, or what caused it-in the usual sense of physical causation-is simply meaningless. Unfortunately, many children, and adults, too, regard this answer as disingenuous. There must be more to it than that, they object. Indeed there is. After all, why should time suddenly "switch on"? What explanation can be given for such a singular event? Until recently, it seemed that any explanation of the initial "singularity" that marked the origin of time would have to lie beyond the scope of science. However, it all depends on what is meant by "explanation." As I remarked, all children have a good idea of the notion of cause and effect, and usually an explanation of an event entails finding something that caused it. It turns out, however, that there are physical events which do not have well-defined causes in the manner of the everyday world. These events belong to a weird branch of scientific inquiry called quantum physics. Mostly, quantum events occur at the atomic level; we don't experience them in daily life. On the scale of atoms and molecules, the usual commonsense rules of cause and effect are suspended. The rule of law is replaced by a sort of anarchy or chaos, and things happen spontaneously-for no particular reason. Particles of matter may simply pop into existence without warning, and then equally abruptly disappear again. Or a particle in one place may suddenly materialize in another place, or reverse its direction of motion. Again, these are real effects occurring on an atomic scale, and they can be demonstrated experimentally. A typical quantum process is the decay of a radioactive nucleus. If you ask why a given nucleus decayed at one particular moment rather than some other, there is no answer. The event "just happened" at that moment, that's all. You cannot predict these occurrences. All you can do is give the probability-there is a fifty-fifty chance that a given nucleus will decay in, say, one hour. This uncertainty is not simply a result of our ignorance of all the little forces and influences that try to make the nucleus decay; it is inherent in nature itself, a basic part of quantum reality. The lesson of quantum physics is this: Something that "just happens" need not actually violate the laws of physics. The abrupt and uncaused appearance of something can occur within the scope of scientific law, once quantum laws have been taken into account. Nature apparently has the capacity for genuine spontaneity. It is, of course, a big step from the spontaneous and uncaused appearance of a subatomic particle-something that is routinely observed in particle accelerators-to the spontaneous and uncaused appearance of the universe. But the loophole is there. If, as astronomers believe, the primeval universe was compressed to a very small size, then quantum effects must have once been important on a cosmic scale. Even if we don't have a precise idea of exactly what took place at the beginning, we can at least see that the origin of the universe from nothing need not be unlawful or unnatural or unscientific. In short, it need not have been a supernatural event. Inevitably, scientists will not be content to leave it at that. We would like to flesh out the details of this profound concept. There is even a subject devoted to it, called quantum cosmology. Two famous quantum cosmologists, James Hartle and Stephen Hawking, came up with a clever idea that goes back to Einstein. Einstein not only found that space and time are part of the physical universe; he also found that they are linked in a very intimate way. In fact, space on its own and time on its own are no longer properly valid concepts. Instead, we must deal with a unified "space-time" continuum. Space has three dimensions, and time has one, so space-time is a four-dimensional continuum. In spite of the space-time linkage, however, space is space and time is time under almost all circumstances. Whatever space-time distortions gravitation may produce, they never turn space into time or time into space. An exception arises, though, when quantum effects are taken into account. That all-important intrinsic uncertainty that afflicts quantum systems can be applied to space-time, too. In this case, the uncertainty can, under special circumstances, affect the identities of space and time. For a very, very brief duration, it is possible for time and space to merge in identity, for time to become, so to speak, spacelike-just another dimension of space. The spatialization of time is not something abrupt; it is a continuous process. Viewed in reverse as the temporalization of (one dimension of) space, it implies that time can emerge out of space in a continuous process. (By continuous, I mean that the timelike quality of a dimension, as opposed to its spacelike quality, is not an all-or-nothing affair; there are shades in between. This vague statement can be made quite precise mathematically.) The essence of the Hartle-Hawking idea is that the big bang was not the abrupt switching on of time at some singular first moment, but the emergence of time from space in an ultrarapid but nevertheless continuous manner. On a human time scale, the big bang was very much a sudden, explosive origin of space, time, and matter. But look very, very closely at that first tiny fraction of a second and you find that there was no precise and sudden beginning at all. So here we have a theory of the origin of the universe that seems to say two contradictory things: First, time did not always exist; and second, there was no first moment of time. Such are the oddities of quantum physics. Even with these further details thrown in, many people feel cheated. They want to ask why these weird things happened, why there is a universe, and why this universe. Perhaps science cannot answer such questions. Science is good at telling us how, but not so good on the why. Maybe there isn't a why. To wonder why is very human, but perhaps there is no answer in human terms to such deep questions of existence. Or perhaps there is, but we are looking at the problem in the wrong way. Well, I didn't promise to provide the answers to life, the universe, and everything, but I have at least given a plausible answer to the question I started out with: What happened before the big bang? The answer is: Nothing.

...great when you can spend idle hours making jokes about eyebrows and cream eggs with people you've never met.

Thanks Xane. For me the glass is always half full rather than half empty, except when it's a vodka and tonic, in which case it goes straight from FULL to EMPTY. :O)

This was what I was trying to get across to my husband last night, this simultaneous event thing. But next question is how can you have nothing without something?