How it all began?’ is a question that has been puzzling humans since their earliest days. Scientists and religious thinkers alike have wondered about how the sun, the stars, the planets—this whole universe—was created. It is interesting to see how the latest theories in science are eerily similar to the earliest philosophical musings in our Vedas.
The theory about the origin of the universe that almost all scientists believe in, is the Big Bang Theory. It was first suggested by a Belgian priest and cosmologist Georges Lemaître, a hundred years ago. It states that the universe came into existence in a big explosion that happened 13.8 billion years ago. The most important evidence supporting this theory is the observation by Edwin Hubble that galaxies are speeding away from us in all directions.
If we could play the events of the universe in reverse, we would go back in time and see all the galaxies moving towards each other until they collapse down to a single point of infinite density and temperature. This point is called singularity by physicists. This point was infinitesimally small—a million billion billionth the size of a single atom. There was no meaning of time or space at this point.
It is, so far, impossible to create such extreme conditions artificially, so no experiments can replicate the conditions before the big bang. No laws of physics hold true at a singularity, so even theory can tell us hardly anything. But the human urge to know and speculate is very strong. This is where we turn to the hymns of the oldest Veda, the Rigveda. It calls this singularity the ‘primordial egg’ and describes it as follows:
There was neither existence, nor non-existence, The kingdom of the air, nor the sky beyond.
What was there to contain, to cover in—
Was it but vast, unfathomed depths of water?
There was no death there, nor Immortality.
No sun was there, dividing day from night.
Then was there only THAT, resting within itself.
Apart from it, there was not anything.
At first within the darkness veiled in darkness, Chaos unknowable, the All lay hidden.
Till straightway from the formless void made manifest
By the great power of heat was born that germ.
It is very exciting to speculate about this extraordinary event that we are all a product of, but who knows how long mankind has to wait before unravelling this secret. As a subsequent verse in the Rigveda says:
Who verily knows and who can here declare it, whence it was born and whence comes this creation?
The Gods are later than this world's
production. Who knows then whence it first came into being?