Non- Fiction Narration
Description
Vocal Characteristics
Language
EnglishVoice Age
Middle Aged (35-54)Accents
British (General) British (Received Pronunciation - RP, BBC)Transcript
Note: Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and may contain errors.
these days, the origin of the universe is explained by proposing a big bang, a single event that instantly brought into being a ll the matter from which everything and everyone are made. The ancient Greeks had a different idea. They said that it all started not with a bang, but with chaos. Was chaos a god, a divine being or simply a state of nothingness? Or was chaos? Justus. We would use the word today, a kind of terrible mess, like a teenager's bedroom, only worse. Think of chaos, perhaps as a kind of grand cosmic yawn, as in a yawning chasm or a yawning void, whether chaos brought life and substance out of nothing, or whether chaos yawned, life up or dreamed it up or conjured it up in some other way. I don't know I wasn't there, nor were you. And yet, in a way, we were because all the bits that made us were there. It's easy enough to say that the Greeks thought it was chaos who with a massive heave or a great shrug or hiccup, vomit or cough, began the long chain of creation that has ended with pelicans and penicillin, toadstools and toads, sea lions, seals, lions, human beings and daffodils and murder and art and love and confusion and death and madness and biscuits. Whatever the truth, science today agrees that everything is destined to return to chaos. It caused this inevitable fate entropy, part of the great cycle, from chaos to order and back again to chaos. Your trousers began his chaotic atoms that somehow coalesced into matter that ordered itself over aeons into a living substance that slowly evolved into a cotton plant that was woven into the handsome stuff that she's your lovely legs. In time, you will abandon your trousers. Not now, I hope. And they will rock down in a landfill will be buried. In either case, their matter will at length be set free to become part of the atmosphere of the planet. And when the sun explodes and takes every particle of this world with it, including the ingredients of your trousers, all the constituent atoms will return to chaos. On what is true for your trousers is, of course, true for you. So the chaos that began everything is also the chaos that will end everything. Now you might be the kind of person who asks. But who or what was there before chaos or who or what was there before the Big Bang? They must have seen something. Well, there wasn't. We have to accept that there was no before because there was no time. Yet no one had pressed the start button on time. No one had shouted now and since time had yet to be created. Time words like before during when, then after lunch on DH last Wednesday had no possible meaning. It screws with head, but there it is, the Greek word for everything. That is the case. What we would call the universe is Cosmos Andi at the moment. Although moment is a time word and makes no sense just now, neither does the phrase just now. At the moment, Cosmos is chaos and only chaos, because chaos is the only thing that is the case, a stretching, a tuning up of the orchestra. But things were about to change very quickly.