“The Universe is nothing but a sweet fart.”
- Kurt Vonnegurt.
When we say “world,” most of us think of our teeny-tiny Earth. A blue dot full of ape-ish bipeds who think history started with dictators, 2014, and trade tariffs. But I am talking about The Universe here. The Big Mamma. The whole cosmic shit show.
We often think things like gravity are just… rules. Like traffic signals. Always there. Always annoying. But hey, even the laws of physics have a past. And that, my dear Watson, is what cosmology is all about — the history of the universe.
Newton knew something was amiss. Gravity should cause all to cave in, right? But he swept it under the carpet. Heinrich Olber wondered why the sky was not uniformly bright and lit, if an infinite Universe had existed for ever. All stars would fill the sky, right? This “Olber’s paradox” was kept in the…er…dark, for 150 years, dammit. The great Einstein knew that the Universe could not just sit there, but he used the ‘cosmological constant’ to tweak his equations.
Yet we found out. How- we will see later.
So, let us rewind what we are now reasonably sure of. Not a few years. Not thousands of years. But fourteen billion years. That is 14 with nine zeroes. Or if you prefer, 1,400 lakhs of lakhs. Enough zeroes to fill a container truck.
As per available evidence, everything began with one massive cosmic fart— The Big Bang! Not a bang like Diwali crackers or your neighbour’s scooter backfiring. This was THE Bang. Capital B. But not really an explosion- but an expansion. A humongous expansion of….stuff. Space, Time, fields, whatnot and whathaveyou.
At the very beginning, there was… nothing. There was a tiny point. A dot. No length, no width, no height. Just potential chaos in a capsule. Physics calls it a singularity. Or maybe not. We are not sure such a thing can exist. But then…..the Fart.
Boom! Without permission or paperwork, this little point (or something) expanded into existence. Not slowly. Not politely. But like your fat uncle dancing at the top of a stair at a wedding, and he tumbling down— no brakes, no rhythm, just expansion. And out popped: space and time.
Next came light. Not candlelight. Not neon signs. But raw, sizzling energy that said, “Here I am, baby!” Tiny particles emerged — electrons, protons, neutrons. They got cozy, formed atoms — mainly hydrogen and helium. Universe: now formed, as it were.
Some of these atoms huddled together into separate clumps under gravity’s big warm hug. Galaxies! Inside each, millions of dense clumps. The more they snuggled, the hotter their insides got. Suddenly: nuclear fusion! Hydrogen went kaboom and turned into helium, lithium, and a few limited cosmic ingredients. Basically, stars became elemental factories. And sources of light.
And these stars? Oh, they lived, burned, and died with drama. Some went supernova — a final cosmic sneeze that made and scattered fancy elements like carbon, oxygen, and iron all over the place. Stuff your bones and brains are made of. Yep. You are stardust with opinions.
Fast forward a few stellar generations, and voilà! Our Sun was born, around 4 billion years ago. One of many stars in a galaxy of billions. Around this middle-aged star, a rocky planet began to whirl — that’s our Earth, baby. Life began. Bacteria. Fish. Dinosaurs. Netflix. Mark Zuckerberg, and Rahul Gandhi. Modi and Me. Yogi Ramdev and You.
We apes just popped in two hundred thousand years ago. A cosmic blink. And what do we do?
We eat, sleep, fart, tweet. Start wars. Argue about gods. Invent religions. Kill each other in the name of said gods. Oh, and yes, we try to understand the universe.
One day I asked God:
“Lord, what’s the meaning of all this?”
God: “Why do you want to know?”
Me: “Well… maybe start a religion? Get some followers. Maybe a fight or two. You know, the usual.”
God: “Kid, imagine 100 kilowatts of electricity flowing through a 0-watt bulb. What happens?”
Me: “The fuse blows.”
God: “Exactly. Ask too much, and your poor little brain will short-circuit. Go wash the dishes. And do not forget to drop your kid to school.
Me: “But Lord, the latest trend is to prance like a headless goat on Instagram reels.”
God: “Then go, my child. Prance. Plunge into the drainage ditch of enlightenment.”
Me: “Yes Lord. I will be back after I rinse the sambar pot. But I won’t. stop. The. Search. I will risk my fuse”
(Jimmy Mathew)
