We have removed the background.
There was no earlier time.
No empty space.
No prior state.
No obvious cause.
So perhaps we have finally reached the beginning.
But there is still a problem.
A beginning must begin something.
And for something to become something, it must become distinguishable.
A thing becomes this rather than that.
An event becomes one event rather than another.
A boundary separates one region from another.
Difference makes distinction possible.
So perhaps the universe began with a difference.
But immediately the old question returns.
A difference from what?
We seem to need two sides.
Something here.
Something there.
A before and an after.
A this and a not-this.
But if this is the first difference, there cannot already be a fully formed second side waiting for it.
Otherwise it was not first.
We have arrived at a strange possibility.
Perhaps the first difference cannot be a difference between two already existing things.
Perhaps it is the difference that makes two things possible.
That sounds almost impossible to imagine.
Yet we encounter smaller versions of it everywhere.
A boundary does not merely separate two already independent territories.
It helps make them distinct as territories.
A doorway does not simply sit between two rooms.
It makes an inside and an outside available as places one can enter and leave.
A distinction can therefore be productive.
It does not merely describe a difference.
It can establish one.
Perhaps this is why the beginning of the universe is so difficult to picture.
We keep imagining the first thing.
But perhaps the more primitive event is not a thing at all.
It is a distinction.
Not:
Something appeared.
But:
Something became distinguishable.
And yet even that formulation is dangerous.
Distinguishable from what?
We are tempted to answer immediately.
From nothing.
But we have already learned that nothing has no address.
So perhaps the first difference does not stand between something and nothing.
Perhaps it is the beginning of the very possibility of distinguishing something from something else.
There would be no completed world waiting on either side.
There would be only the emergence of a distinction from which a world of differences could develop.
This changes the meaning of “first.”
The first need not be the earliest item in a sequence.
It might be the first condition under which a sequence becomes possible.
And perhaps a beginning is not necessarily an event that happens first.
Perhaps it is the emergence of a difference from which before and after can subsequently become meaningful.
If so, the question—
What came before the first difference?
—has become almost impossible to ask.
For “before” is now one of the things the difference makes possible.
We began by looking for the first thing.
Perhaps we should have been looking for the first distinction.
But there is one problem left.
If possibility itself depends upon relations and distinctions, then perhaps even possibility has a history.
And if that is true, we have not yet reached the beginning.
We have reached something stranger:
the point at which possibility itself begins to become possible.
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