Big Bang

The Big Bang is the first event in the book’s account of what it would take to make an apple pie from nothing. By placing the pie’s ordinary ingredients at the end of a chain that begins before the world exists, the opening makes cosmic origins the hidden precondition of everyday creation.

Place in the Chain of Origins

The account begins with the Big Bang and expanding universes, then moves through neutrons, ions, atoms, black holes, suns, moons, ocean tides, and the Milky Way before reaching Earth. The sequence continues through evolution, dinosaurs, extinction-level events, platypuses, Homo erectus, and Cro-Magnon man. The Big Bang is therefore not treated as an isolated scientific term: it marks the start of an accumulating history whose later stages make human life and its works possible.

From Cosmic History to an Apple Pie

The chain descends from cosmic beginnings to the practical conditions of baking. Fire, water, fertile soil, and seeds precede cows, milking, and churning butter; wheat, sugar cane, and apple trees supply further necessities. Chemistry and biology are also required. Each apparently simple ingredient carries a history of conditions and labor behind it, so making a pie from nothing means tracing those dependencies back to the beginning of the universe.

The Big Bang as a Narrative Starting Point

The opening invokes Carl Sagan’s thought experiment that making an apple pie from scratch requires inventing the universe. It widens the scale of a familiar domestic task until the pie depends not only on cosmic and natural history but also on art, the printing press, the Industrial Revolution, and even a poem. The Big Bang thus anchors a deliberately expansive account: an everyday object is presented as the endpoint of a world-sized history, rather than as something that can truly be made in isolation.