So I confess: I have no idea where ideas come from.

But is this altogether really so strange?

If you happened to watch the excellent Professor Jim Al-Khalili pair of programmes Everything & Nothing on BBC4 a month or so ago he rather brilliantly conveyed the notion that the universe -- long thought to be a vast vacuum called Space -- is in fact teeming with minute particles of matter and anti-matter (no, stay with me) that spark into existence for a fraction of time (literally) and then disappear again. Matter is cancelled out by anti-matter. 

You can read more about this in this week’s brilliant New Scientist magazine -- the existential issue, dated 23 July 2011.

I find this kind of thing mind blowing. Or rather mind expanding.

The follow-on suggestion of matter popping into and out of existence is that such a spark of matter and anti-matter popping into existence could possibly have ignited the Big Bang. 

And as the universe seems to like the idea of symmetry (atoms… planets.. universes), and is basically all made of the same stuff I can’t help but think there’s a beautiful analogy here.

I can’t help but find the whole idea of things popping into and out of existence across the universe a neat mirror of our own fates here on earth. The thought being that there is no reason for these particles to come into being. They appear and disappear within the blink of an eye. 

As Samuel Beckett says in Waiting for Godot “We give birth astride a grave. the light gleams an instant, then it is night once more.” 

And I also can’t help but find a neat mirror with the creation, formulation and existence of ideas.

Ideas are nothing more than chemical and electrical charges in the brain chasing one another around, causing other charges to react. A series of mini explosions and pulses of blood and electrons that flow and connect and expand.

In Everything & Nothing some very clever people at the BBC illustrated the Big Bang with CGI: a huge fireball explosion, from “no thing” came “every thing” (life, the universe, everything as Douglas Adams says). And after the initial explosion, ... after a short lull of milliseconds, there came a second, more powerful blast. The energy created by the first bang fed on itself and created something even bigger. Even better.

It created. It was creative. It developed. It expanded. It existed.

So the next time anyone says “let’s expand on that idea”, you think on.