The Universe Again

From Bill Bryson's folksy survey of scientific knowledge, A Short History of Nearly Everything: "It is natural but wrong to visualize the singularity [the dimensionless 'spot' into which all matter had been squeezed, so to speak, and from which the universe in a sense emerges] as a kind of pregnant dot hanging in a dark, boundless void. But there is no space, no darkness. The singularity has no 'around' around it. There is no space for it to occupy, no place for it to be. We can't even ask how long it has been there--whether it has just popped into being, like a good idea, or whether it has been there forever, quietly awaiting the right moment. Time doesn't exist. There is no past for it to emerge from" (10). And our universe? "Now the question that has occurred to all of us at some point is: what would happen of you traveled out to the edge of the universe and, as it were, put your head through the curtains? Where would your head be if it were no longer in the universe? What would you find beyond? The answer, disappointingly, is that you can never get to the edge of the universe. That's not because it would take too long to get there--though of course it would--but because even if you traveled outward and outward in a straight line, indefinitely and pugnaciously, you would never arrive at an outer boundary. Instead, you would come back to where you began . . . " (16-17). The curvature of time and space in the universe and all that. In such a condition, do anxieties like claustrophobia mean anything? And so I am answered (see posting on 5/31/10): we're not really in a floating cigar. Ultimately, from a cosmic perspective, we're nowhere at all.