Chapter 1: Beyond The Crunch

It was perhaps predictable that the ranks of cosmic evolutionists would be augmented by Professor Ovis Jopp (pronounced Yopp), the lean, seven-foot-two, green-bearded ‘Sage of Trondheim’, regarded by some as the greatest scientist of our time. Jopp says that although he has yet to apply a few touches, his contribution is the most significant one to date. He accepts that there was a big bang about 14 billion years ago, but opposes many cosmologists by maintaining that this will be reversed. The fearless Nordic scholar went further, predicting what will follow the crunch.

Never afraid to demonstrate his ideas, Professor Jopp tried out this one in a field near Narvik, where he took a gigantic green balloon and festooned its surface with blobs of clay to simulate the galaxies. Respecting his penchant for using the lowest technology for any given task, he employed student volunteers, who took turns on a car foot pump to produce a vast globe, into which Jopp had initially inserted his famous secret green box. Then the team, working on fast-retracting gantries at staggered heights, deflated the sphere with simultaneous pinpricks.

Recovery of the green box revealed the strange phenomena of post-crunch physics. The shrinkage will be so violent that not only will everything be squashed to a virtual zero point, but will then emerge inverted in an explosion following the collapse. There will be counter-galaxies, counter-solar systems and even a counter- Earth, where humans and buildings will be, as it were, upside down inside the crust, retained in place by reverse gravity. Waving a foot-long cigar of green seaweed, Jopp added that the new cosmos would have an emerald hue.

Earlier explanations of our universe will, the professor suggests, be overtaken by his findings. “We can forget Einstein’s E equals whatever it was,” he said. “My proposition is far more elegant. The mathematical notions are abstruse, but in layman’s terms, the resultant equation is IF=EP, meaning that implosive force equals emitted power. I don’t think there will ever be any advance on this.”

Not everyone agrees. Professor Jopp’s arch rival, the ‘Swedish Savant’, Dr Terps Dunderklap, was scathing. “Jopp is an idiot,” he snapped. “He does not realise that apart from those in our solar system, all celestial bodies are thin, carpet-like structures. There will indeed be an implosion as they rush together, heaping themselves one atop the other before collapsing under their own masses, forming a sheet of infinitesimal thickness and virtually infinite length and width, from which nothing will emerge. Jopp will be a part of that flatness and I shall walk over him then as I do now. That might cure him of his obsession with green things. Also, the vapid Viking does not tell us what is inside his balloon. Is he saying that our universe is empty in the middle, with matter only on the surface of an arbitrarily conceived sphere? If so, perhaps he used his head as a template. Incidentally, he could have used, as I did last year, a soccer ball, paper hankies and a dash of nitroglycerine.”

Speaking from a Stockholm girls’ school, Dunderklap, five-foot-four in height and similar in circumference, did not explain how he will survive the compression, while Jopp will succumb. However, Dr D’s prestige is such that no disinterested party is willing to reject his contention, though it does not yet have a title or a supporting equation. When told of it, Jopp was dismissive. Beaming across his green-topped desk, he suggested that ‘The Axminster Theory’ might be appropriate, as he would soon pull the carpet out from under Dunderklap’s feet.

Time, or space-time, will tell which, if either, of these intellectual giants is right.