Expanding

I spent the fourth of July on the banks of the Willamette River watching the fireworks show. It wasn't too crowded and the air was brisk. The light show had a strange and pleasant effect on me. I kept visualizing ''the beginning of time' or more commonly known as "the big bang". Everything that is measurable in the universe started after a big light show certainly grander in scale than I was seeing. The diference being the fireworks I was watching was expanded into streams of light for a few seconds, while our universe has been expanding similairly for thousands of years. Every expanding universe must have began with a singularity. I think I appreciated the show a bit more having this thought to hold on to.

I was driving past the Cascades last weekend and I noticed that from a distance the mountain range appeared symmetrical on the horizon. From a distance it looked the same in every direction. If I were to examine any mountain more closely, my result set would clearly change and I might be overcome at trying to compare all the differences between any 2 of the numerous peaks in the range. Is one observation more accurate than the other? Up close the natural world might be described as random (unique rings of a tree or rock formations in a cliff on the Cascades) and on a larger scale it might be described as recursive ( think of a forest or the Cascades) and the same in every direction. Depending on the experiment, the mountain range seemed to satisfy both of these seemingly very different states. I wonder if there is an experiment where both states are satisfied at the same time?

There is scientific evidence that suggests that the universe, on a large enough scale appears the same in every direction. It is also expanding in what seems a random fashion. Can the expanding universe be symmetrical and entirely random at the same time ? Isn't randomly recursive an oxymoron ? Hawking describes it as a balloon with dots painted on it that is gradually being filled with air. As the universe or in this case the balloon expands the distance between the dots remain consistent relative to each other.