Preparing for the Miraculous

sri aurobindo and the big bang 207exotic elements – inflation, dark matter, dark energy – tomake it fit observations.” And string theory has spawnednot only the possibility of a multitude of universes, a “multiverse,”but an infinity of them.Paul Steinhardt is not a science fiction writer, he is AlbertEinstein Professor of Science at Princeton. His opinion:“Recently some cosmologists have been exploring the possibilitythat the universe is exponentially older [than thoughtuntil now]. In this picture, the evolution of the universe is cyclic.The Big Bang is not the beginning of space and time buta sudden creation of hot matter and radiation that marksthe transition from one period of expansion and cooling tothe next cycle of evolution. Each cycle might last a trillionyears, say. Fourteen billion years marks the time since thelast infusion of matter and radiation, but this is brief comparedto the total age of the universe. Each cycle lasts abouta trillion years and the number of cycles in the past mayhave been ten to the googol power or more!” 25 “Googol” isa fancy word that means an unimaginably big number. Allat once science too discovers the enormous time spans of“a day of Brahman” and “a year of Brahman” in the Hinduscriptures, time spans which seem to have some meaningafter all in the mental construct of an “oscillating universe,”in other words “the cyclic world revisited,” to borrow aphrase from Paul Davies.In Sri Aurobindo’s interpretation, however, this is notthe senseless recurrence of a Nietzschean eternal and eternallyexact replication. “[The ancient Hindu] believes thatNature has repeated [her cycles] over and over again, asindeed it is probable she has done, resuming briefly and insum at each start what she had previously accomplished in25 In John Brockman (ed.): What is Your Dangerous Idea? p. 126 (emphasisadded).