Brainiac

Consider electrical charge. In our universe, there are positively and negatively charged particles. How did all that charge come into being out of nothingness? It didn’t, Atkins writes, since “the total charge is zero.” The Big Bang merely separated out a uniform state of chargelessness into many individual instances of charge, positive and negative. The same goes for matter and energy generally: The total amount of matter and energy in the universe seems to be balanced out by huge amounts of “dark” matter and energy. The nothingness before the Big Bang has never really gone away: Today’s universe is a “Nothing that has been separated into opposites to give, thereby, the appearance of something.”

This suggests that the Big Bang doesn’t mark the creation of something out of nothing. If that happened at all - and it may be, Atkins points out, that there was has never been absolutely Nothing, in a total sense - then it probably happened even further back in the pre-cosmological past. Instead, the Big Bang marks the emergence of texture, differentiation, and particularity out of even, unchanging featurelessness - of interestingness, in short, out of boredom.

Doppelganger Village Here in the United States, Las Vegas casinos like Paris Las Vegas and The Venetian re-create foreign architecture in a cartoony, miniaturized form. That’s weird enough - but Chinese architects have upped the ante. According to Der Spiegel, an exact replica of an Austrian town is being built in China’s Guangdong province. The 800 residents of the real Hallstatt, a UNESCO World Heritage site, have only just learned about the plans, and are, Der Spiegel reports, “scandalized.”