APPENDIX
Did the Universe `Begin'?
[PDF version of this article (see last two pages)]
The following interchange took place at the May 5-6 conference of the Schiller Institute in Bad Schwalbach, Germany. Its included as an appendix to LaRouche's May 13, 2001 campaign statment, "Faith, Hope, and Agape!"
Q: Man has an amazing capability to understand the universe, and therefore we are in harmony with it. And in the Timaeus, what he goes through, is—I think one thing, that definitely has been going through my mind, is why did I assume, that the universe has not always existed? And what Timaeus goes through, is that anything that is perceptible, has come to be; and there is not anything in this universe that hasn't come to be, as far as I can see, except for maybe the ordering, the principles, or the cognition of man that has always existed. What I wanted to know is: What is the definite distinction between whether the universe has always existed, or whether it was created? And also, what was the intention in creating it? Thank you.
Lyndon LaRouche: It is a good sound question and a fundamental one. . . . Just think about "always." What do you mean by always? Think about, what we knew, know, and don't know. Think about, what I did refer to earlier, about this Scheinprobleme der Wissenschaft ["Imaginary Scientific Problems," by Max Planck]. Don't give ourselves false problems, simply because they apparently fit a formula. What do we know? Not, "What infinite extensions of space do you imagine?" What do we know?
When we say universe, what do we mean? In physics, in physical science. What do we mean by universe? We mean, that which corresponds to what we call, universal physical laws.
Now, Vernadsky enhances our understanding of what we ought to mean by the words "universal physical laws," by his introduction of his concept of the natural products, respectively of the so-called non-living universe, the living processes, and cognition. So, therefore that means, that when any one of these things existed—. . . . Cognition existed from the beginning of the universe. Cognition existed as soon as there was a non-living universe. The principle of life necessarily existed, since it is independent of anything else at the point of any notion of beginning.
So, that is the universe. The universe is bounded by this notion of the interaction and mulitiple-connectedness of three universal principles. [First,] a principle we associate with non-living processes—which is not necessarily entropic. Don't assume this means entropy; it means processes which we do not identify as being living ones, or can not. [Second,] living processes, which are distinct and experimentally distinct in a universal way, though we have not full proof of that, because we did not treat this seriously enough, long enough. And thirdly, the thing which we ought to know, is that man is the master of the universe. . . .
If man is cognitive, if man can master the universe and can do so by discovery of universal physical laws, for example, then man is made in an image of an individuality, an individual being called the Creator. And there was never anything before that, no universe. But there is no limit on the universe, because it is the universe, because there is nothing outside it.
That is what we know: There is nothing outside or before the universe. To try to find out what it might be, is to pose in one's mind the appearance of a false problem, the false appearance of a problem. And trying to solve it, is like trying to mine green cheese on the Moon—don't do it! It is wasted time and it tastes terrible. . . .
So, that is the point. So, the issue here, is to understand our relationship to the universe. We are what? We are made in this respect, because we only embody cognition, we are made each in the image of the Creator of the universe, and we were always and always will be as individuals connected to the Creator of the universe. That is all there is to it. And we should learn to act accordingly, especially with respect to one another, with respect to other human beings. We are all part of the process of the ongoing co-creation of the universe.
Look, what happened, essentially—Vernadsky gives the answer, with his idea of natural products—the development of the biosphere as we know it on Earth, as Vernadsky defines it with his approach to natural products, occurred in a certain point in the development of the Sun, which is some long time ago, when, according to Kepler's implicit rules, it was spinning very fast and it was much bigger—not that much bigger, but bigger.
And it spun very fast, and it spun off a ring, like the rings of Saturn, and these rings were much hotter than any part of the Sun, inside the Sun. And from the Sun was coming radiation, more strongly than now. This radiation hit this ring and the ring became hotter and hotter; it was polarized, you know. How do we know that? Because we found 92 elements in the Solar System, and that means, that the Solar System had to have been developed in terms of a planetary sytem, at a certain energy-flux-density, a certain level of fusion.
Now, what happened, according to Kepler's laws, the principle of Kepler's laws, is that this material is spun out from the ring, where the fusion is occurring. And where does it go? It is condensed, like a big fractional distillation apparatus to distill petroleum and its various kinds of petroleum products, motor oil, when you get so much kerosene, so much gasoline, and so force it all to spin off. One of these places it goes to, was called Jupiter, another was called Saturn, and so forth; so you had the planetary orbits. And some of the stuff is spun off and falls through. It goes by the same principles, the same laws.
This is initially very hot. The material of the planets is condensed into planets. The material is distributed first in an orbit, then it condenses, it condenses, it heats up, it fuses, it forms planets at various degrees—no apparent life yet. Then, at a certain point, the planet develops; at a certain condition, the harvest is ready, and living processes, as we know them, begin to show their presence on Earth—at a later stage, the development of living processes on Earth, developing the biosphere. They transform the biosphere. They produce preconditions, under which human life, cognitive forms of life, can emerge, including us.
But in a sense, we were always there, and when you think of yourself in your relationship to someone like Archimedes or Kepler, or someone in the distant future, a scientist, in terms of the exchange of a concept between two minds across the great distances of apparent time: You were there, and you will be there, and you are always there, because you are a part of the universe.
That is the universe. There is nothing mystical about that; it may be seen as mystifying to some people, but it is not mystical. That is what we know, that's what we can prove. And before that and outside that—we call that nothing.
