It was the day of the Big Bang and we were all very excited.

I had decided to surf the leading edge of the expansion( nod to Dark Star). I had borrowed my Mum’s ironing board and prepared a package of sandwiches and a flask of coffee. I also had one of those revolving yellow beacons that truckers use to annoy other road users. I had fitted the beacon with a meter so I could see how much power it was using.

Then we were off

Oh, it was a wild ride. I never found out what happened to my flask of coffee.

Behind me, all the glory of creation unfolded. In front – not so much.

I noticed that as the beacon turned towards the direction of travel, the meter showed no load. No power was being consumed during the forward arc of the traverse. There was nowhere for any light to go, so none was sent.

A light wave does not transmit energy.

It is an “invitation to treat” for the transfer of a packet of energy to an appropriate receptor.

An “appropriate” receptor is one that can accommodate the energy packet defined by the wave.

A source emits a light wave uniformly in all directions. The wave system can be converted into a directed beam by reflection or by lensing. This will produce a wave packet consisting of the outgoing direct wave followed by a series of reflected or lensed waves, forming a composite “smeared out” wave packet.

If the wave encounters an appropriate receptor, a packet of energy as defined by the wave parameters will be transferred instantaneously to the receptor. The wave will no longer be viable and even if it subsequently encounters a receptor, no other energy transfer can take place.

A source does not beam energy into the void which may or may not be absorbed by a receptor. The valid, viable receptor has to exist before energy transmission takes place.

This means that the universe is not bleeding energy into the void. It only transfers energy internally, up to the limits of extant receptors. This limit is the outer front of the universe.

The instantaneous transfer of energy, once the transfer “protocols” have been established, causes problems of perception for our very restricted ape-brains. But, we are all quite comfortable with the analogous concept of an instantaneous inter-bank financial transfer of funds where, once the exchange protocols are established, a transfer can be made instantaneously, within the limits of the financial system.

All concepts of time are based, fundamentally, on the behaviour of light waves. It has been assumed that the energy transfer must be included in the wave. This has avoided the minor inconvenience of contemplating energy transfer over long distances without any association with time.

This is easier to understand if the Universe is considered as an equation of state. Every point in the universe is a term in the equation of state.

There are rather a lot of them. But most are “empty” and can be considered as 0.

When a term changes values, it will be perceived as “something is happening at this point”. If the change is transient, it will be assumed that “something” has passed through that point and we will look for a sequence of terms, not necessarily consecutive, that show matching changes. The collection of terms showing matching sequential changes will be considered as an event.

It is assumed that one of the “Rules of the Railway” is that nothing in the universe is “stationary”.

“Everything” is moving, either in space or time, or both.

For convenience and peace of mind, it is assumed that the Right-Hand Side of the Universal Equation of State is 0. This would seem logical for a universe that appeared out of “Nowherewhen”( a word denoting the absence of both space and time).

But it could be 42.

The point of all this is that transferring energy from one point to another is only a matter of a mathematical operation on a spreadsheet, admittedly a big one, possibly even infinite. It could be represented by an array which is re-dimensioning continually.

If a spreadsheet is used as an analogy; when running operations on a very large spreadsheet, it is much faster to perform the calculations in the supporting VBA environment and then updating the “front” spreadsheet with the final results.

In the banking analogy, it is much faster to make an electronic transfer than to send a courier to the far side of the world with a cheque, on a mountain bike, wearing hideous lycra and ignoring all traffic regulations. Even after arrival, the courier’s cheque still needs to be validated and cleared through the banking system.

We just don’t need lycra-clad photons careering all over the place.