the cosmic egg model—where everything began with a sudden explosive event—similar to what Edgar Allan Poe originally proposed in an 1848 essay. In this model, the universe was presented as a kind of self-operating machine. It was composed of stupid stuff, meaning atoms of hydrogen and other elements that had no innate intelligence. Nor did any sort of external intelligence rule. Rather, unseen forces such as gravity and electromagnetism, acting according to the random laws of chance, produced everything we observe.
