Opium was in widespread use as a tincture or ingredient in various medications, so he'd probably *had* it. I doubt, though, that he was firing up an opium pipe and spending weeks in dreamland.
------
Jub: You rock. First taste goes to Alexander the Great, 300 years before Christ, then plants travel via Islamic Arabic slave traders ("banan" is Arabic for "finger") to Madagascar, across Africa to Guinea, where the fruit meets the Portuguese in the 1400s, just before Columbus sets sail. Awesome.
----
reidcourchie: that question would be more at home in the Laboratory Q&A topic, but still...
the answer depends on what exactly was happening at the formation of the universe. If it happened like most scientists believe, with a Big Bang explosively unfolding a singularity into the four dimensions of space-time, you'd really only ever get to see remnants of energy from a (relatively) short time after the Big Bang. Before that moment, there's no space, no mass, no light -- at least, not as separable phenomena. And we at the point where the telescope is set up were coterminous with every other point, all mass and all energy in the universe.
There's a faint glowing haze that powerful telescopes have picked up called Cosmic Background Radiation. It comes from everywhere at once. Many experts believe this is the distant echo of the Big Bang -- the energy released as the new universe unfolded itself. More powerful telescopes might tell us more, indirectly, about this energy, but as far as before the universe is concerned, we're inside the universe so we can't see it at the necessary distance. It's all around us in every direction at once. |
