Last updated 19:46, Thursday, 18 September 2008

I WAS setting off on holiday as scientists set about their experiment to prove the Big Bang theory of the creation of the universe.

So, as I was making these notes in the departure lounge, I don’t know whether you, dear readers, will still be here to read my thoughts by the time this article is published; the world, perhaps, will have ended.

Anyway, there was this thing happening in Switzerland, and they were firing atoms or something at each other, and they were either going to discover what happened when the big bang occurred, or they were going to create a big black hole and we were all going to fall into it.

Any experts reading the above explanation will already have figured out that I am not exactly sure of my scientific facts.

But, frankly, I don’t think that matters, because I’ve discovered that nobody else does either.

I reckoned that if the world was going to end, I should really try and find out why, so I started to listen to a series on Radio 4 “explaining” physics and science etc to me. Who are they kidding?

There are quarks and quirks and quorks and all sorts of other “things” that made no sense to me whatsoever.

And whoever was giving the explanation even admitted that some of these “things” had never been seen. They were just theories.

In fact, one of them was completely made up and the scientists were as surprised as anyone when the “thing” (I think it was a “quork”) was found to exist.

Well, I say exist, but apparently all these “things” are surrounded by other “things”. Apparently if you try to pull one “thing” off another “thing”, the outer “thing” acts like a strong rubber band and is impervious to all attempts to pull it off. The energy created trying to separate the whatsit from the whodicky results in another thingummyjig being created.

Yeah! Right!

I don’t want to put science back hundreds of years, but I do wonder about this whole Big Bang theory (it probably deserves capital letters just to separate it from what happens on November 5).

Please explain to me how an accidental blow-up can result in the sun being so conveniently placed where it is, how planets spin around others planets, and stars and moons hang where they are supposed to and, after millions of years nothing has collided with us yet.

Just explain how I needed to evolve to the extent that I love poetry, and sad movies that make me cry?

What earthly or scientific use is there in my ability to be so absorbed in a book that the nothing else around me matters? How did I - and you lot, incidentally, come from a split second explosion?

Have you ever seen an explosion? Has it ever produced anything more wonderful than what was there before? No!

I won’t bring God the Creator into the argument. I find the theory of creation a lot easier to believe but, in the interests of science, I will leave the existence of a higher being out of this.

So that leaves the question open. Now all you have to do is fill in the blanks.

My son has been over here on holiday from New Zealand; he is something of a sci-fi geek and my comments would probably send him hysterical.

But he, with all his comic book knowledge, can’t explain what’s going on. He fobs me off with the answer “because” - yet he will not accept my reasoning when I go down the creation line.

I am not a fundamental creationist. I don’t want to throw people into prison or burn them at the stake when they try to tell me I evolved from a monkey and that the world was created by a massive accident.

Let them talk about it all they want. The day the prove it, then I’ll change my mind.

So, presuming the world didn’t end some time after I jetted away, I do hope you enjoyed reading this article. Indeed, I hope you are still around to enjoy anything at all.