Godly Avenger's Stupid Blog

And God Sighed an immense Sigh, and said, "All right, fine.

"So the way it works is that all of space and time is permeated by a field that has imaginary mass."

And Cambiel said, "Imaginary mass, O Generous Provider?"

And God said, "Yes, imaginary mass. It's tachyonic, d'you see?"

And Sarathiel, the Angel of Discipline, said, "Wait a minute, I thought we agreed nothing was going to travel faster than light? All that 'c' business and the whole Lorentz transformation thing. What's happening with that?"

And God said, "Let me finish. The field is tachyonic. The particles in the field all move slower than light."

And Sarathiel had to think about this for a second.

And God said, "The point is, a field with imaginary mass has a non-zero vacuum expectation value."

And this really gave Sarathiel trouble, since he had never been very good at math.

And God, seeing this, went back to explain. "Most fields, like the electromagnetic field, have no effect when they are at their lowest energy state. It's like they're not there at all. If you give a field imaginary mass, then it vanishes only when it's at a very high energy state, and at a low energy state, it has a nonzero value everywhere."

And Sarathiel nodded, but he was confused, because he didn't understand why God would create such a thing.

But Verchiel thought he saw where God was going with this, and he was amazed.

"Truly, you are cunning beyond measure, O Only One Certainly Sound and Genuine in Truth! Only now do I understand your design! For in order to make the universe homogenous and isotropic, it is necessary that all large-scale fluctuations in temperature and mass must be evened out early in the history of the cosmos; and therefore, you have designed a field which will rapidly expand space after the Big Bang, many orders of magnitude in brief moments, and then swiftly and spontaneously decay as it gives up the energy it began with, giving rise to radiation and particles of all kinds as it does, which will condense into the material universe! It is a wonder to behold."

And God said, "What? No. I mean I did, but this isn't the inflaton field I'm talking about. This is something else."

And Verchiel said, "Wait, it's not?"

And God said, "No, I'm going to use a different field to drive cosmic inflation. The properties of this field are totally different."

And now Verchiel was also confused, and lapsed into silence.

And God said, "Like I was saying, this field is a scalar field with imaginary mass, and it does spontaneously decay to a ground state with a non-zero value. But it's not the inflaton field. Instead it combines with the W1, W2, W3, and B bosons."

And Metatron began to flip back through the pages of the Heavenly Record trying to figure out where he'd lost the thread.

And Zephaniel said, "The what bosons?"

And God said, "The W1, W2, W3, and B bosons. I'm sure I mentioned them. You know, the massless bosons?"

And Zephaniel said, "I'm pretty sure we only talked about the W+, W-, and Z0 bosons. All of which you said were going to have mass, O Owner of All Sovereignty."

And God said, "Yes, but this is how they get them, you see. Once this field acquires a nonzero value everywhere, the massless bosons interact with it and get mass. Well, some of them do. They turn into the W+, W-, and Z0 boson. And the photon."

And Zephaniel said, "…and the photon, O Accepter of Invocation?"

And God said, "Well, I did say I was going to unify the electromagnetic force and the weak interaction, didn't I? This is how. Above the critical temperature--right now I'm thinking 10^15 K, but I'm open to feedback on that one--electromagnetism and the weak force act as a single unifying force. Below that temperature, the field gets a nonzero value, you get three massive bosons to mediate the weak interaction, and the photon pops out seperately."

And Zephaniel said, "That seems… a bit overly complicated, doesn't it, O Reinstater Who Brings Back All?"

And God said, "No, it's exactly what we need. Look, that way the W and Z bosons have something to do, but the weak interaction still only travels short distances. Gravity is still the star of the show on cosmic scales, as it were. But now quarks and leptons can swap their flavor!"

And Zephaniel said, rather weakly, "Their… flavor, O Source of Good?"

And God said, "It's this new quantum number I'm trying out, to give the three generations of matter more unique identities."

And Cambiel said, "Three generations of matter? Now I'm really confused."

And God said, "I'm sure I mentioned this. You've got the lightest quarks and leptons, and then two heavier versions of each that can decay into the lighter versions."

And Cambiel said, "What do they do? New kinds of chemistry, is it?"

And God said, "Well, no. Mostly they just decay in a couple microseconds. Or even faster."

And Zephaniel began to rub his temples, and Cambiel sniffed.

And Cambiel said, "This all seems a bit ad hoc to me. Not really the stuff of an elegant and obviously ordered Creation. Why not have four generations of matter? Why not a trillion?"

And God began to grow irritable, and said, "Well, that's not really up to you, now is it? We're going to have three generations of matter, and the electroweak force, and that's that!"

And Zephaniel said, "As long as we are unifying fundamental forces, perhaps we could somehow also unify the electroweak interaction with the strong interaction, or even gravity."

And God hesitated saying, "Well, I haven't decided about that yet. I'm not sure I want gravity to be quantized, you know? Seems to take some of the geometric elegance out of general relativity."

And the Spirit of God, who was also one of the angels whose job it was to do the actual grunt work, was not in a terrific mood. Because the Spirit of God--whose name was Raguel, and whose official title was Angel of Justice--would really have preferred at that moment to be up in Heaven, in the spheres of eternity beyond time, space, and reality, enjoying a nice, cold glass of something with bubbles. Instead, however, he was hovering over the waters, which were murky and dim, and trying to see if anything interesting was happening like it was supposed to. But the atmospehre was choked by volcanic ash and meteoric dust, and the Sun was still pretty dim--ergo all that darkness--and Raguel was pretty sure he was wasting his time. In his right hand he held a great rod of iron, which he was using to poke at the shallow bits in kind of a desultory way.

And as Raguel was poking, there was a loud crack and a burst of lightning, and Azazel, the Angel of Death, appeared in the air beside Raguel.

"Sorry I'm late!" he said. "Gosh, I completely lost track of time. Been out whacking neutron stars together for fun, you know. Lovely watching all those heavy elements go whoosh! all over the place."

"You're not late," Raguel said with some displeasure. "Nothing's happened yet."

"What, nothing?" Azazel looked down at the surface of the deep. "How can you tell?"

"You just can," Raguel said. "It's still all just amino acids and nucleobases. Not so much as an enzyme yet."

Azazel looked at his watch. "Huh. The All-Subtle isn't usually late."

"Pah," Raguel said. "The Ever-Adept's got nothing to do with it. This is all down to Adriel's boys in the astronomy department. They were five hundred million years late delivering the first Population I stars, and it's all been chaos since. This whole place is a rush job. Look!"

He waved one shimmering arm out over the endless expanse of sea.

"They forgot the continents! Not so much as a granite boulder peeking above the waves!"

Azazel looked around. He did seem to remember something about how Earth was going to have dry land, divided from the sea.

"Maybe the mortals will be… aquatic?" Azazel suggested.

Raguel shook his head. "They have their excuses. 'Oh, we'll fix it with plate tectonics, we'll build the cratons up over time. We'll have the first super-continent ready in just a few hundred million years!' I've seen the drawings. Their 'super-continent' is barely the size of Australia."

"Oh dear," Azazel said. Then, "What's an Australia?"

"Doesn't matter," Raguel said. "If the biology department fucked this up, there won't be an Australia, or much of anything else for that matter. It'll be HD 49674 all over again. Did you know this is the fifty-third planet in this galaxy that's supposed to have had life on it that's failed? At this rate if intelligent life ever does evolve, it's going to wonder why the universe is so damn empty."

"I imagine that the Giver of Life is, er… displeased?"

"He's not thrilled," Raguel said. "But you know how it is with Him. Soon enough he's off on his next idea. I think this might really upset him, though. He's been talking about these damn monkeys nonstop. He's got big plans for them. Language. Religion. Art. Science. Something called 'pickleball.' I'm not looking forward to breaking the news to Him."

"Oh, yes," Azazel said. "I suppose it gives me more time for supernova billiards. But… I don't know. I was kind of looking forward to the whole Angel of Death gig."

"Were you?" Raguel said. "Seems like a pretty grim task."

"Oh, I don't know," Azazel said. "There should be lots of travel. Lots of meeting new people."

"Briefly," Raguel said.

"Your problem," Azazel said, drawing himself up, "is that you don't appreciate the grand scope of things. The Plan as a whole. The elegance of a really good Divine Mystery."

"That's because I've seen how the sausage gets made," Raguel said. "You don't spend ten billion years trying to wrangle Powers and Dominions and subcontractors without developing a certain cynicism about all that. Without noticing that the Plan, such as it is, seems rather improvisational."

"I'm pretty sure that's blasphemy," Azazel said.

"Go report it to a priest," Raguel said. "Oh, wait, you can't, because they're never going to evolve in the first place."

"Someone's got a case of the Mondays," Azazel muttered. And Raguel was annoyed by this bit of snark, not least because Mondays had not been invented yet. So he poked Azazel with his iron rod.

Now Azazel became wrathful; and he yanked Raguel's iron rod from his hands. And Raguel said, "Hey! Give that back!" And Azazel held it away from him at arm's length and said, "Bite me." And the two angels scuffled for a bit, and Raguel tripped, and fell into the waters.

Azazel was embarrassed by his behavior, which did not befit the Left Hand of the Creator, and helped Raguel up. And they apologized to one another. And then Raguel looked down to wring some of the waters out of his shining white robes, and saw something stirring in the shallow end of the deep.

"Look!" he said.

Azazel gasped. Raguel's tumble had caused a ripple, which had perturbed a small clump of organic goo clinging to a rock. There, in a small pore in the rock, the first primitive cell was forming. The first life on Earth.

"Finally!" Azazel said. He raised his hands, and there was a thunderclap, and there appeared in them a scythe of black steel, whose blade was dark as night, whose edge was ruin.

"Not yet!" Raguel hissed. "It's just getting started!" For an agonizing few minutes, they watched this primitive proto-cell congeal, tremble, absorb some interesting molecules that were floating by in the primordial seas, and then--hestiantly, as if it was an actor not quite sure of its lines--begin to divide. Just as it pinched itself off in the middle, Azazel let the scythe fall. There was a whisper in the air that spoke of extinction, of grief, of the long silence at the end of time. Then two cells were sitting where once one had stood. And Azazel was holding something in his hand that sparkled with a faint blue light.

"Is that…?" Raguel began.

"A soul!" Azazel said. "They told me about these. I had no idea they would be so beautiful."

Raguel looked over Azazel's shoulder at it.

"Hello, soul!" Azazel said. "What is your name?"

The soul, whose earthly existence had been somewhat less than a quick cigarette break, sat in Azazel's palm and quivered. It said nothing.

"What do you do with them, anyway?" Raguel asked.

"Um. You know, I'm not sure," Azazel said. "Maybe I'll start a collection. We've got all that unused space up where we were going to put the true forms of reality, before we dropped the whole Platonism angle. Could probably fit a couple TREE(3) of souls up there."

"Shouldn't you check with somebody? Maybe these soul things are important."

"I'm sure it's fine," Azazel said. He manifested a small jar, and tipped the soul into it. He held it out to Raguel. "Souvenir?" he asked.

Raguel shook his head. "No," he said. "You're the Angel of Death, I think souls should be your department. But thanks. I guess this wasn't a total waste of an afternoon."

He was about to unmanifest, to return to the endless empyrean beyond, when he paused, and looked down at Azazel's scythe.