By Peter Bennett
March
16, 2003
A couple of months back,
Wendy and I watched a program on TV about the London sausage wars. During
this fascinating expose of the dark underworld of sausage manufacture
and marketing, two rival sausage manufacturers made claims, counter
claims and allegations over which of them were the originators of a
whole variety of sausage recipes we'd never heard of. We watched spellbound
as the proprietors of the two "sausageries" argued over who
first introduced the wild boar and rosemary, the beef, mango and oregano
and, the crem de la crem of the sausage world, the venison, lavender
and pineapple.
We found the whole thing
rather amusing but it left a certain taste in our mouths - for sausages.
We rued the fact that where we live we couldn't buy anything remotely
similar to these flaccid gourmet delights available to those who inhabited
the bangers and mash capital of all Christendom. The sausages at our
local supermarket have so much fat in them that no cooking oil is required
to fry them and the taste is just plain boring.
"You'd think someone
here would be able to open a gourmet sausage shop," I said to Wendy.
"Where would he get his recipes though?" she replied. I could
see by the expression on her face that she immediately wished she hadn't
said it. She knew exactly what my reply would be. "On the Net,"
I said.
Wendy is something of an
internet widow in that I just love surfing the Net and once I sit down
to look for something it's ten to one that it'll be ten to one before
I'll eventually crawl into bed. I sat down and flicked the switch. "I'm
going around to Junie's place for a while then," said Wendy.
In no time I was up to my
ears in sausage recipes, about 1400 web sites worth of them. I looked
at about a dozen but they were all those continental hard sausages like
Polish sausage or Hungarian salami. The sausages we'd seen on the TV
program were those limp, English style sausages which become hard when
you fry them. Then I thought of the word "bangers". I asked
the search engine to locate search strings like bangers, bangers &
mash, gourmet bangers, big bangers and so forth. And then
a remarkable thing happened - after 45 minutes I'd found out how the
universe works. My Big Bangers search brought forth a web site
by a retired engineer who's written a couple of books about why the
Big Bangers (those who believe in the Big Bang theory of creation) are
all wrong. Now, I must confess that I' ve never been too interested
in whether or not the big bang actually happened because, to be quite
frank, whenever I've heard anybody talking about the Big Bang the conversation
was quite unintelligible.
There were however, a couple
of things I've always thought were a bit silly about the whole idea.
As I understood the Big Bang it was something about the Mother of all
explosions having taken place and everything in the universe having
been travelling outward away from the site of the explosion ever since.
Well, that's always sounded highly suspect to me because if there was
nothing there to begin with, what was this Mother of all explosions
going to explode into? See, it's already too much for ordinary humans
to understand isn't it? And anyway, where was all the fuel to fuel the
explosion supposed to come from if there was nothing there?
This huge explosion must
have needed fuel of some sort being shoved into it at a rate of knots
to carry on exploding. To me it's simple. It's like my annual bonfire
which will only continue to burn as long as I keep throwing branches
on it. The way I looked at the Big Bang was that if this tiny piece
of matter exploded into a hole (which couldn't have existed because
all the ingredients of the universe were supposed to be inside this
bit of matter and not outside it) and was to carry on exploding/burning,
then where was all the fuel going to come from - who was going to keep
throwing the branches on?
What I could never fathom
was how could this Big Bang come from nothing? I mean, nothing comes
from nothing does it? Does it? But there are lots of things I can't
work out. I don't know why lemmings don't buy life insurance and I've
often wondered if Mormons all have the same pressure in their bicycle
tires.
Something else I could never
fathom and I'd never considered to be related to the mysteries of the
universe, was the rubber plant at our corner store. On the way to the
office every Monday through Friday for about 15 years I called into
the same corner store to get my daily newspaper and, when I used to
smoke, a packet of cigarettes. One day I noticed that Con, the proprietor,
had bought a rubber plant in a pot and placed it in the window. Over
the years this plant became so intrusive that it wound itself all around
the shop almost twice and covered the spot on the wall where the cigarettes
were kept. I discussed it with Con one day and he told me that the plant
must just have enjoyed the microclimate and convivial atmosphere in
the shop adding that he'd tried to prune it once but that it wept a
sticky sap which was all but impossible to get off the floor.
One Monday I fronted up for
my morning paper and the rubber plant had gone. The shop was so much
bigger and brighter. Con told me that he and his wife had chopped the
plant (now a tree) up and taken it to the tip and that they' d had to
make two trips because of the sheer bulk of the plant. This got me thinking
about where all this vegetation came from and when I got to the office
I posed the question to my colleagues. If the rubber plant was so big
that it wound all around Con's shop two times over, then where did it
all come from given the pot was still full of soil?
We never did work it out.
One school of thought was that some of it came from nutrients in the
artificial fertilizer that Con probably lavished upon it and the rest
of the bulk came from the water he gave it. But that couldn' t be the
case because if you dried the plant until there was zero moisture in
it a sizeable herd of elephants could never have trampled it all down
to a size where you could fit it back into the pot. And, anyway, the
pot was still full of soil and roots.
Con's rubber plant went to
meet its maker something like ten years and I haven't thought about
it since. Not until, that is, I found the Origin and Dynamics of the
Universe website at www.universesciencebooks.com
and learnt all about how the universe really works.
It was so simple, you just
burn the rubber plant and it changes state into a cloud of smoke and
a handful of ashes. What happens then? Well, it still exists but in
another state and it gets recycled. Trees - who are well known carbon
junkies - breathe in burnt rubber plant smoke, along with just about
any old smoke they can get their grasping little leaves on, and make
wood from it. They even get time to breathe out oxygen while they're
doing it! Some other bits of Con's rubber plant will probably come back
in the newspapers Con sells; other bits as venison, lavender and pineapple
sausages. How Buddhist is that?
After reading a couple of
pages of the web site I'm now firmly convinced that the Big Bang is
a complete load of twaddle and that it's all a bit of a scientific con
perpetuated by scientists who just won't let go of an unworkable theory.
Instead, they keep inventing new hypotheses to fit the story in order
to keep it going. Nothing does come from nothing as the Big Bang theorists
advocate. It all comes from the same celestial compost heap and gets
reused over and over.
Emil Cseko whose web site
has made me a dinner party expert on the subject of life, the universe
and everything, has formulated four physical laws which, when you read
them, easily explain why the Big Bang didn't happen and what did happen
instead. In much abbreviated form, and as far as I am able to understand
them, they are:
- Growth: That everything
begins with a nucleus and grows outwards like Con' s rubber plant.
This holds true for the whole universe.
- Limits of growth: Everything
has a limit of growth already programmed into it. This means that
Con's rubber plant wouldn't have gone on increasing in size forever.
I mean, whoever saw a rubber plant as big as the Empire State building?
This holds true for the universe too - it has an in-built limit, it
won't go on expanding forever.
- Cycles: That everything
is cyclical, what goes around comes around again in one form or another.
Day follows night over & over again, satellites cycle around planets.
Rubber plants grow from seeds (or do they send up suckers?) grow until
the limit, die and their offspring do the same again. As with Con's
rubber plant, so too with the universe. It goes through cycles giving
birth to new galaxies, growing them to the limit of growth and then
recycling them to create new forms.
- Recycling: This
law is interesting. It says that the whole kit and caboodle, everything
you can imagine and everything you can't, gets recycled. The
part that grabbed my attention was the bit about what happens when
our universe (which is accelerating) reaches the speed of light. At
this point - according to Mr. Wilson (my old science teacher) who
got it from Einstein - time slows down & stops. According to the
web site this is when it all gets really exciting because that's when
we reach the physical growth limit. Put very briefly what happens
is that beyond it, lies the world of timelessness, of eternal permanence
and this is where everything comes from and goes back to before coming
around again. Physical matter is subject to change just as has now
happened to Con's rubber plant rotting away quietly underground at
the tip. The same pattern holds true for the physical Universe - galaxies
and other forms of matter that have completed their cycles enter a
process of recycling.
I can understand this approach
because I've seen the process of recycling going on all my life. Somebody
somewhere grew the corn, which made the bread for my kid's school sandwiches.
Somebody else made the cheese, which went in them. Somebody else (me)
made compost out of them when the kids brought them home again uneaten.
The compost then went to grow something they would eat like peaches.
In fact my old cycle was probably recycled. It was made of metal and
when Dad backed over it, it was deemed unserviceable and he took it
to the wrecker's yard where it's probably been recycled into two unicycles
or a gaggle of toenail scissors or perhaps 500 of those spiky things
for getting stones out of horses hooves.
Wendy and I sat down to
our first homemade sausages a couple of weeks back. She got the recipe
from a book of sausage recipes at the newsagent's. They were pork, apple
and apricot with a "hint" of basil. The taste was great but
the consistency a bit sticky and they left the frying pan kind of sticky
too. I didn't mention it to Wendy but I'm convinced that some of the
sap from Con's rubber plant ended up in the sausage skins through a
short in the recycling process. I dread to think where the constituents
of Con's rubber plant, via the newspapers and sausages, could end up
next.
