Posted on 03/30/2023 7:24:41 AM PDT by Red Badger
The hot Big Bang is often touted as the beginning of the Universe. But there's one piece of evidence we can't ignore that shows otherwise.
The notion of the Big Bang goes back nearly 100 years, when the first evidence for the expanding Universe appeared. If the Universe is expanding and cooling today, that implies a past that was smaller, denser, and hotter. In our imaginations, we can extrapolate back to arbitrarily small sizes, high densities, and hot temperatures: all the way to a singularity, where all of the Universe’s matter and energy was condensed in a single point. For many decades, these two notions of the Big Bang — of the hot dense state that describes the early Universe and the initial singularity — were inseparable.
But beginning in the 1970s, scientists started identifying some puzzles surrounding the Big Bang, noting several properties of the Universe that weren’t explainable within the context of these two notions simultaneously. When cosmic inflation was first put forth and developed in the early 1980s, it separated the two definitions of the Big Bang, proposing that the early hot, dense state never achieved these singular conditions, but rather that a new, inflationary state preceded it. There really was a Universe before the hot Big Bang, and some very strong evidence from the 21st century truly proves that it’s so.
Our entire cosmic history is theoretically well-understood, but only because we understand the theory of gravitation that underlies it, and because we know the Universe’s present expansion rate and energy composition. We can trace out the timeline of the Universe to exquisite precision, despite the uncertainties and unknowns surrounding the very beginning of the Universe. From cosmic inflation until today’s dark energy domination, the broad strokes of our entire cosmic history is known. (Credit: Nicole Rager Fuller/National Science Foundation)
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Although we’re certain that we can describe the very early Universe as being hot, dense, rapidly expanding, and full of matter-and-radiation — i.e., by the hot Big Bang — the question of whether that was truly the beginning of the Universe or not is one that can be answered with evidence. The differences between a Universe that began with a hot Big Bang and a Universe that had an inflationary phase that precedes and sets up the hot Big Bang are subtle, but tremendously important. After all, if we want to know what the very beginning of the Universe was, we need to look for evidence from the Universe itself.
In a hot Big Bang that we extrapolate all the way back to a singularity, the Universe achieves arbitrarily hot temperatures and high energies. Although the Universe will have an “average” density and temperature, there will be imperfections throughout it: overdense regions and underdense regions alike. As the Universe expands and cools, it also gravitates, meaning that overdense regions will attract more matter-and-energy into them, growing over time, while underdense regions will preferentially give up their matter-and-energy into the denser surrounding regions, creating the seeds for an eventual cosmic web of structure.
The Universe doesn’t just expand uniformly, but has tiny density imperfections within it, which enable us to form stars, galaxies, and clusters of galaxies as time goes on. Adding density inhomogeneities on top of a homogeneous background is the starting point for understanding what the Universe looks like today. (Credit: E.M. Huff, SDSS-III/South Pole Telescope, Zosia Rostomian)
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But the details that will emerge in the cosmic web are determined far earlier, as the “seeds” of the large-scale structure were imprinted in the very early Universe. Today’s stars, galaxies, clusters of galaxies, and filamentary structures on the largest scales of all can be traced back to density imperfections from when neutral atoms first formed in the Universe, as those “seeds” would grow, over hundreds of millions and even billions of years, into the rich cosmic structure we see today. Those seeds exist all throughout the Universe, and remain, even today, as temperature imperfections in the Big Bang’s leftover glow: the cosmic microwave background.
As measured by the WMAP satellite in the 2000s and its successor, the Planck satellite, in the 2010s, these temperature fluctuations are observed to appear on all scales, and they correspond to density fluctuations in the early Universe. The link is because of gravitation, and the fact that within General Relativity, the presence and concentration of matter-and-energy determines the curvature of space. Light has to travel from the region of space where it originates to the observer’s “eyes,” and that means:
* the overdense regions, with more matter-and-energy than average, will appear colder-than-average, as the light must “climb out” of a larger gravitational potential well,
* the underdense regions, with less matter-and-energy than average, will appear hotter-than-average, as the light has a shallower-than-average gravitational potential well to climb out of,
* and that the average density regions will appear as an average temperature: the mean temperature of the cosmic microwave background.
When we see a hot spot, a cold spot, or a region of average temperature in the CMB, the temperature difference we see typically corresponds to an underdense, overdense, or average-density region at the time the CMB was emitted: just 380,000 years after the Big Bang. This is a consequence of the Sachs-Wolfe effect. However, other, later-time effects can also cause temperature fluctuations. (Credit: E. Siegel/Beyond the Galaxy)
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But where did these imperfections come from, initially? These temperature imperfections that we observe in the Big Bang’s leftover glow come to us from an epoch that’s already 380,000 years after the start of the hot Big Bang, meaning they’ve already experienced 380,000 years of cosmic evolution. The story is quite different, depending on which explanation you turn toward.
According to the “singular” Big Bang explanation, the Universe was simply “born” with an original set of imperfections, and these imperfections grew and evolved according to the rules of gravitational collapse, of particle interactions, and of radiation interacting with matter, including the differences between normal and dark matter.
According to the inflationary origin theory, however, where the hot Big Bang only arises in the aftermath of a period of cosmic inflation, these imperfections are seeded by quantum fluctuations — that is, fluctuations that arise due to the inherent energy-time uncertainty relation in quantum physics — that occur during the inflationary period: when the Universe is expanding exponentially. These quantum fluctuations, generated on the smallest scales, get stretched to larger scales by inflation, while newer, later-time fluctuations get stretched atop them, creating a superposition of these fluctuations on all distance scales.
The quantum fluctuations that occur during inflation do indeed get stretched across the Universe, and later, smaller-scale fluctuations get superimposed atop the older, larger-scale ones. This should also, in theory, produce fluctuations on scales larger than the cosmic horizon: super-horizon fluctuations. These field fluctuations cause density imperfections in the early Universe, which then lead to the temperature fluctuations we measure in the cosmic microwave background. (Credit: E. Siegel/Beyond the Galaxy)
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These two pictures are conceptually different, but the reason they’re interesting to astrophysicists is that each picture leads to potentially observable differences in the types of signatures we’d observe. In the “singular” Big Bang picture, the types of fluctuations that we’d expect to see would be limited by the speed of light: the distance that a signal — gravitational or otherwise — would have been allowed to propagate if it were moving at the speed of light through the expanding Universe that began with a singular event known as the Big Bang.
But in a Universe that underwent a period of inflation prior to the start of the hot Big Bang, we’d expect there to be density fluctuations on all scales, including on scales larger than the speed of light could have allowed a signal to travel since the start of the hot Big Bang. Because inflation essentially “doubles” the size of the Universe in all three dimensions with each tiny-fraction-of-a-second that passes, fluctuations that occurred a few hundred fractions-of-a-second ago are already stretched to a scale larger than the presently observable Universe.
Although later fluctuations superimpose themselves atop the older, earlier, larger-scale fluctuations, inflation allows us to start the Universe off with ultra-large-scale fluctuations that shouldn’t exist in the Universe if it began with a Big Bang singularity without inflation.
The quantum fluctuations inherent to space, stretched across the Universe during cosmic inflation, gave rise to the density fluctuations imprinted in the cosmic microwave background, which in turn gave rise to the stars, galaxies, and other large-scale structures in the Universe today. This is the best picture we have of how the entire Universe behaves, where inflation precedes and sets up the Big Bang. (Credit: E. Siegel; ESA/Planck and the DOE/NASA/NSF Interagency Task Force on CMB research)
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In other words, the big test that one can perform is to examine the Universe, in all its gory details, and look for either the presence or absence of this key feature: what cosmologists call super-horizon fluctuations. At any moment in the Universe’s history, there’s a limit to how far a signal that’s been traveling at the speed of light since the start of the hot Big Bang could’ve traveled, and that scale sets what’s known as the cosmic horizon.
* Scales that are smaller than the horizon, known as sub-horizon scales, can be influenced by physics that’s occurred since the start of the hot Big Bang.
* Scales that are equal to the horizon, known as horizon scales, are the upper limit to what could’ve been influenced by physical signals since the start of the hot Big Bang.
* And scales that are greater than the horizon, known as super-horizon scales, are beyond the limit of what could’ve been caused by physical signals generated at or since the start of the hot Big Bang.
In other words, if we can search the Universe for signals that appear on super-horizon scales, that’s a great way to discriminate between a non-inflationary Universe that began with a singular hot Big Bang (which shouldn’t have them at all) and an inflationary Universe that possessed an inflationary period prior to the start of the hot Big Bang (which should possess these super-horizon fluctuations).
The leftover glow from the Big Bang, the CMB, isn’t uniform, but has tiny imperfections and temperature fluctuations of a few hundred microkelvin in magnitude. These fluctuations were generated by a combination of processes, but the temperature data, on its own, isn’t able to determine whether superhorizon fluctuations exist or not. (Credit: ESA and the Planck Collaboration)
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Unfortunately, simply looking at a map of temperature fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background isn’t enough, on its own, to tell these two scenarios apart. The temperature map of the cosmic microwave background can be broken up into different components, some of which occupy large angular scales on the sky, and some of which occupy small angular scales, as well as everything in-between.
The problem is that fluctuations on the largest scales have two possible causes. They could be created from the fluctuations that arose during an inflationary period, sure. But they could also be created simply by the gravitational growth of structure in the late-time Universe, which has a much larger cosmic horizon than the early-time Universe.
For example, if all you have is a gravitational potential well for a photon to climb out of, then climbing out of that well costs the photon energy; this is known as the Sachs-Wolfe effect in physics, and occurs for the cosmic microwave background at the point at which the photons were first emitted.
However, if your photon falls into a gravitational potential well along the way, it gains energy, and then when it climbs back out again on its way to you, it loses energy. If the gravitational imperfection either grows or shrinks over time, which it does in multiple ways in a gravitating Universe filled with dark energy, then various regions of space can appear hotter or colder than average based on the growth (or shrinkage) of density imperfections within it. This is known as the integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect.
At late times, photons fall into gravitational structures like rich clusters or sparse voids, and then leave again. However, matter can flow in or out of these structures, and the expansion of the Universe can change the strength of that potential during the time a photon traverses it, creating a relative redshift or blueshift owing to what’s known as the integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect. (Credit: B.R. Granett et al., ApJ, 2008)
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So when we look at the temperature imperfections in the cosmic microwave background and we see them on these large cosmic scales, there isn’t enough information there, on its own, to know whether:
* they were generated by the Sachs-Wolfe effect and are due to inflation,
* they were generated by the integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect and are due to the growth/shrinkage of foreground structures,
* or they’re due to some combination of the two.
Fortunately, however, looking at the temperature of the cosmic microwave background isn’t the only way we get information about the Universe; we can also look at the polarization data of the light from that background.
As light travels through the Universe, it interacts with the matter within it, and with electrons in particular. (Remember, light is an electromagnetic wave!) If the light is polarized in a radially-symmetric fashion, that’s an example of an E-mode (electric) polarization; if the light is polarized in either a clockwise or counterclockwise fashion, that’s an example of a B-mode (magnetic) polarization. Detecting polarization, on its own, isn’t enough to show the existence of super-horizon fluctuations, however.
This map shows the CMB’s polarization signal, as measured by the Planck satellite in 2015. The top and bottom insets show the difference between filtering the data on particular angular scales of 5 degrees and 1/3 of a degree, respectively. (Credit: ESA and the Planck Collaboration, 2015)
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What you need to do is perform a correlation analysis: between the polarized light and the temperature fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background and correlate them on the same angular scales as one another. This is where things get really interesting, because this is where observationally looking at our Universe allows us to tell the “singular Big Bang without inflation” and the “inflationary state that gives rise to the hot Big Bang” scenarios apart!
* In both cases, we expect to see sub-horizon correlations, both positive and negative ones, between the E-mode polarization in the cosmic microwave background and the temperature fluctuations within the cosmic microwave background.
* In both cases, we expect that on the scale of the cosmic horizon, corresponding to angular scales of about 1 degree (and a multipole moment of about l = 200 to 220), these correlations will be zero.
* However, on super-horizon scales, the “singular Big Bang” scenario will only possess one large, positive “blip” of a correlation between the E-mode polarization and the temperature fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background, corresponding to when stars form in large numbers and reionize the intergalactic medium. The “inflationary Big Bang” scenario, on the other hand, includes this, but also includes a series of negative correlations between the E-mode polarization and the temperature fluctuations on super-horizon scales, or scales between about 1 and 5 degrees (or multipole moments from l = 30 to l = 200).
This 2003 WMAP publication is the very first scientific paper to show the evidence for super-horizon fluctuations in the temperature-polarization correlation (TE cross-correlation) spectrum. The fact that the solid curve, and not the dotted line, is followed to the left of the annotated green dotted line is very difficult to overlook. (Credit: A. Kogut et al., ApJS, 2003; annotations by E. Siegel)
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What you see, above, is the very first graph, published by the WMAP team in 2003, a full 20 years ago, showing what cosmologists call the TE cross-correlation spectrum: the correlations, on all angular scales, that we see between the E-mode polarization and the temperature fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background. In green, I’ve added the scale of the cosmic horizon, along with arrows that indicate both sub-horizon and super-horizon scales. As you can see, on sub-horizon scales, the positive and negative correlations are both there, but on super-horizon scales, there’s clearly that big “dip” that appears in the data, agreeing with the inflationary (solid line) prediction, and definitively not agreeing with the non-inflationary, singular Big Bang (dotted line) prediction.
Of course, that was 20 years ago, and the WMAP satellite was superseded by the Planck satellite, which was superior in many ways: it viewed the Universe in a greater number of wavelength bands, it went down to smaller angular scales, it possessed a greater temperature sensitivity, it included a dedicated polarimetry instrument, and it sampled the entire sky more times, further reducing the errors and uncertainties. When we look at the final (2018-era) Planck TE cross-correlation data, below, the results are breathtaking.
If one wants to investigate the signals within the observable Universe for unambiguous evidence of super-horizon fluctuations, one needs to look at super-horizon scales at the TE cross-correlation spectrum of the CMB. With the final (2018) Planck data now in hand, the evidence is overwhelming in favor of their existence. (Credit: ESA and the Planck collaboration; annotations by E. Siegel)
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As you can clearly see, there can be no doubt that there truly are super-horizon fluctuations within the Universe, as the significance of this signal is overwhelming. The fact that we see super-horizon fluctuations, and that we see them not merely from reionization but as they are predicted to exist from inflation, is a slam dunk: the non-inflationary, singular Big Bang model does not match up with the Universe we observe. Instead, we learn that we can only extrapolate the Universe back to a certain cutoff point in the context of the hot Big Bang, and that prior to that, an inflationary state must have preceded the hot Big Bang.
We’d love to say more about the Universe than that, but unfortunately, those are the observable limits: fluctuations and imprints on larger scales leave no effect on the Universe that we can see. There are other tests of inflation that we can look for as well: a nearly scale-invariant spectrum of purely adiabatic fluctuations, a cutoff in the maximum temperature of the hot Big Bang, a slight departure from perfect flatness to the cosmological curvature and a primordial gravitational wave spectrum among them. However, the super-horizon fluctuation test is an easy one to perform and one that’s completely robust.
All on its own, it’s enough to tell us that the Universe didn’t start with the hot Big Bang, but rather that an inflationary state preceded it and set it up. Although it’s generally not talked about in such terms, this discovery, all by itself, is easily a Nobel-worthy achievement.
This excerpt was reprinted with permission of Big Think, where it was originally published.
The point I’m trying to make is that a singularity is a mathematical concept, not a physical reality. There are many mathematical concepts that simply cannot exist in the physical world. There are functions that go from - infinity to + infinity in zero time. There are functions that have finite volume, but infinite surface area - you can fill them with paint, but you can’t paint them with the paint they contain. And there are singularities. In many instances, over the immense space of the universe, black holes can be treated as singularities. The mathematics of singularities will adequately describe their behavior. That doesn’t make them singularities.
The Big Bang theory treats the universe as a singularity at its start. The problem there is that the math still doesn’t work out. That’s why cosmic ‘inflation’ was invented. The math around the start of the Big Bang works out just fine, as long as the laws of physics are ignored during the first few hundred thousand years, or so. That’s not a ‘theory’, that’s a cop-out.
My preferred viewpoint towards evolution (devolution) and long ages is:
Pantheism (wherein God and the Universe are identified with each other) is commonly considered to have been first formalized a few centuries ago by Baruch Spinoza, though numerous pagan religions going back to Antiquity had pantheistic elements.
Given that it's been around for a while, it's not exactly that radical.
It's also heretical, contradicting many aspects of Divine Revelation, and incompatible with what God has revealed about Himself. To quote from the Old Catholic Encyclopedia on Pantheism:
It has often been claimed that pantheism by teaching us to see God in everything gives us an exalted idea of His wisdom, goodness, and power, while it imparts to the visible world a deeper meaning. In point of fact, however, it makes void the attributes which belong essentially to the Divine nature For the pantheist God is not a personal Being. He is not an intelligent Cause of the world, designing, creating and governing it in accordance with the free determination of His wisdom. If consciousness is ascribed to Him as the one Substance, extension is also said to be His attribute (Spinoza), or He attains to self-consciousness only through a process of evolution (Hegel). But this very process implies that God is not from eternity perfect: He is forever changing, advancing from one degree of perfection to another, and helpless to determine in what direction the advance shall take place. Indeed, there is no warrant for saying that He "advances" or becomes more "perfect"; at most we can say that He, or rather It, is constantly passing into other forms. Thus God is not only impersonal, but also changeable and finite-which is equivalent to saying that He is not God.
It is true that some pantheists, such as Paulsen, while frankly denying the personality of God, pretend to exalt His being by asserting that He is "supra-personal." If this means that God in Himself is infinitely beyond any idea that we can form of Him, the statement is correct; but if it means that our idea of Him is radically false and not merely inadequate, that consequently we have no right to speak of infinite intelligence and will, the statement is simply a makeshift which pantheism borrows from agnosticism. Even then the term "supra-personal" is not consistently applied to what Paulsen calls the All-One; for this, if at all related to personality, should be described as infra-personal.
Once the Divine personality is removed, it is evidently a misnomer to speak of God as just or holy, or in any sense a moral Being. Since God, in the pantheistic view, acts out of sheer necessity--that is, cannot act otherwise--His action is no more good than it is evil. To say, with Fichte, that God is the moral order, is an open contradiction; no such order exists where nothing is free, nor could God, a non-moral Being, have established a moral order either for Himself or for other beings. If, on the other hand, it be maintained that the moral order does exist, that it is postulated by our human judgments, the plight of pantheism is no better; for in that case all the actions of men, their crimes as well as their good deeds, must be imputed to God. Thus the Divine Being not only loses the attribute of absolute holiness, but even falls below the level of those men in whom moral goodness triumphs over evil.
There are many more such criticisms of pantheism, but I'll leave off with this one: if pantheism is true (that the Creator and the Creation are one), then what was the point of the Incarnation of Christ?
As you would say MeganC, regarding putting God into a box: that is not the case. Rather, it is equivalent to hearing a false gospel, and declaring it anathema, as St. Paul taught the Galatians.
Is God everywhere?
For as Christ Himself said: "God is a spirit; and they that adore Him, must adore Him in spirit and in truth." - John 4:24
Now I'll ask you a question: you previously postulated that "Why is it then so hard to consider that maybe God is everywhere because He consists of everything and everywhere?"
Does that mean, then, that even Satan and all the devils and demons could also be part of God?
Did God create Lucifer?
He did. Your apparent implication — that created beings retain some aspect of the essence or being of the Creator, such that they are therefore still a part of the one who created them — does not follow.
I’ll ask again: do you think that Satan and all the devils and demons could be a part of God?
You already answered your question when you acknowledged that God is everywhere.
If God is omnipresent in creation then everywhere you look, there He is.
We retain free will yet we are His cteations and He is present in us like it or not.
If He is omnipresent then the difference between Creator and creation is semantic.
“There are many mathematical concepts that simply cannot exist in the physical world.”
I enjoy FR.
One of the most enjoyable parts is when folks make definitive statements about topics philosophers have been debating for thousands of years.
We have no clue what is “possible” and what is not in the physical world—until we understand all of it.
Homo sapiens is just beginning on that journey—arrogance is usually found in smart teenagers that are so proud of what they have learned that they can’t focus on what they do not know.
You seem to have a particular conception of omnipresence — namely, pantheism — that does not comport with Divine Revelation.
If He is omnipresent then the difference between Creator and creation is semantic.
It's hardly semantics. Distinguishing the modes and operations of God and His creatures is important if we are to avoid having erroneous ideas about our Creator, for they could easily lead to false implications (such as: if everything is part of God, then God is also the author of sin and moral evil), or to render things explicitly revealed by God into utter nonsense (such as the world's necessity for a Redeemer; if Creation is already part of God, did He therefore redeem Himself?).
These sorts of questions require distinguishing between such various things like essence, being, nature, accidents, presence, and so forth, and what it means to be everywhere to begin with: "Space, like time, is one of the measures of the finite, and as by the attribute of eternity, we describe God's transcendence of all temporal limitations, so by the attribute of immensity we express His transcendent relation to space. There is this difference, however, to be noted between eternity and immensity, that the positive aspect of the latter is more easily realized by us, and is sometimes spoken of, under the name of omnipresence, or ubiquity, as if it were a distinct attribute. Divine immensity means on the one hand that God is necessarily present everywhere in space as the immanent cause and sustainer of creatures, and on the other hand that He transcends the limitations of actual and possible space, and cannot be circumscribed or measured or divided by any spatial relations. To say that God is immense is only another way of saying that He is both immanent and transcendent in the sense already explained. As some one has metaphorically and paradoxically expressed it, "God's centre is everywhere, His circumference nowhere." That God is not subject to spatial limitations follows from His infinite simplicity; and that He is truly present in every place or thing — that He is omnipresent or ubiquitous — follows from the fact that He is the cause and ground of all reality. According to our finite manner of thinking we conceive this presence of God in things spatial as being primarily a presence of power and operation — immediate Divine efficiency being required to sustain created beings in existence and to enable them to act; but, as every kind of Divine action ad extra is really identical with the Divine nature or essence, it follows that God is really present everywhere in creation not merely per virtuten et operationem, but per essentiam. In other words God Himself, or the Divine nature, is in immediate contact with, or immanent in, every creature — conserving it in being and enabling it to act. But while insisting on this truth we must, if we would avoid contradiction, reject every form of the pantheistic hypothesis. While emphasizing Divine immanence we must not overlook Divine transcendence."
I think Thomas Aquinas would provide clarity on the exact nature of what you're trying to grasp at, per Question 8 of his Summa: "The existence of God in things."
He is indeed everywhere, in the sense that all created beings require God as their efficient cause, and therefore cannot exist without Him. It does not follow, however, that creatures — being corporeal beings — therefore retain the essence or attributes that are proper to God simply because they were created by Him.
Your ideas, insofar as they've been presented, are not new. They've been reviewed, analyzed, debated, and categorized long before you or I were born.
Pantheism is the worship of all gods. I never said any such thing. May as well accuse me of fascism while you’re at it.
The worship (or at least acknowledgement) of all gods/deities is Omnism, not pantheism.
Pantheism is "the philosophical religious belief that reality, the universe and the cosmos are identical to divinity and a supreme being or entity, pointing to the universe as being an immanent creator deity who is still expanding and creating, which has existed since the beginning of time, or that all things compose an all-encompassing, immanent god or goddess and regards the universe as a manifestation of a deity." Alternatively, "the doctrine that the universe conceived of as a whole is God and, conversely, that there is no God but the combined substance, forces, and laws that are manifested in the existing universe. The cognate doctrine of panentheism asserts that God includes the universe as a part though not the whole of his being."
Is this not an accurate representation of the ideas you've disclosed on this thread?
The word means both things and with that we are done.
“Nothing travels faster than the speed of light except for bad news which obeys rules of its own.”
I am done here.
The Infinite Improbability Drive was a wonderful new method of crossing interstellar distances in a mere nothingth of a second, without “tedious mucking about in hyperspace.”
Yes, it is quite entertaining, isn’t it?
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