Until recently, sixth form science had taught me that to start with there was nothing, and from that nothing came something. And that something came about with a massive explosion patronisingly called the Big Bang. Fine.
Apart from according to last night's Horizon, that's not exactly right, and if I've learned anything, it's to trust the television above all else.
So what happened before the big bang? Perhaps it's just me, but it seems you can reel out a scientist who will have a hypothesis to back up any wild theory you may care to construct, and another 8 scientists happily willing to shoot it down. Unless you've got Stephen Hawking attending your lecture of course. Fortunately for the producers on Horizon, these scientists appear to live in a sort of hippy commune for physics somewhere in Canada, and spend their days playing cricket and nonchalantly scribbling on blackboards. They must spend a fortune on chalk.
According to our hippy physicists, the universe is everything from a Swiss fondue to one of trillions of universes triggered by black holes. Throughout the show, I’m half expecting one of the scientists to remark “Look, we give up, it was God ok?” or to say "Really, we're just ants, and a light year is actually a centimetre, and the entire universe is another massive scientists petri dish" Ok, I'm obviously far from qualified, and to me the most plausible theory that's not my own seems to be a constantly inflating and deflating universe, in which gravity becomes repellent instead of attractive. I like that. Disgusting, repellent gravity making physicists lives hard.
All in all, an interesting documentary, and the BBC should be lauded for making such programming, but please, please, don't try and explain to me how there can be different kinds of nothing, because one nothing can actually have something. My brain bleeds.