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An FT reader ignited a Big Bang on our letters page a couple of Saturdays ago, raising some intriguing questions about space-time – and sparking other readers to offer their thoughts on bosons and super-symmetry as well as chickens and eggs.

Kenyon Bradt from Muncie, Indiana lit the blue touch paper by asking about the “primordial locus” of the Big Bang:

Would it have had any spatial extension or temporal duration before the outburst? … Is it possible for there to be an existence that is non-spatial and non-temporal?

These would be perfect questions for my favourite fictional theoretical physicist Dr Sheldon Cooper. With two doctorates, a master’s degree and an IQ of 187, Sheldon is the ultimate uber-geek. If anyone can help Mr Bradt probe the nature of space and time, it is Caltech’s frighteningly obsessive Nobel-prize-winner-in-waiting.

Sadly, at this precise time of day Dr Cooper always plays Klingon Boggle, so it falls to me to help out instead. It won’t be quite the same, but it’s surprising what you can pick up by osmosis from watching “The Big Bang Theory”.

Let’s jump right in with an article by Tim Folger, published three years ago in Discover Magazine, in which real-life physicist Carlo Rovelli says that time may not exist at all – at least at the quantum level. “It may be that the best way to think about quantum reality is to give up the notion of time – that the fundamental description of the universe must be timeless,” Professor Rovelli is quoted as saying.

Time, he says, could be an “emergent property” that comes into being only when you look at the bigger picture. (A good analogy is temperature, which doesn’t exist for an individual molecule but emerges as a collective property when lots of molecules bump around together.)

I can feel my inner Sheldon stirring, but Prof Rovelli hasn’t finished. In the article, he also does away with space:

If time and space are one day shown to consist of quanta, the quanta could all exist piled together in a single dimensionless point. “Space and time in some sense melt in this picture,” says Rovelli. “There is no space any more.”

Oh, dear Lord – so much for the final frontier – (my inner Sheldon can hardly contain himself) – and just when I was putting the final touches to a grand unified theory of everything … Bazinga!

Prof Rovelli’s theorising is only one way of interpreting quantum reality but it seems to offer Mr Bradt some possible answers – and by straying into territory more normally associated with metaphysics.

Are there further pointers perhaps in the history of western philosophy? A quick browse through several centuries of metaphysical thinking and, once again, it seems there’s a lot less to space and time than meets the eye. As often as not, both are explained – or explained away – in terms of our mentality.

Neither time nor space is substantial for Gottfried Leibniz. Rather similar to Prof Rovelli’s “single dimensionless point” is the “monad” – the non-extended, immaterial, indivisible entity that Leibniz believed to be the ultimate building block of the world; a mental atom.

The Jewish-Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza writes that thought is a pervasive feature of an intrinsically intelligible infinite universe, which is the cause of itself. For him, the mental realm and the physically extended world are one and the same thing looked at from two different perspectives.

Immanuel Kant’s insight is that space, time and causality are projections of our cognitive apparatus and have no reality independent of human experience. They are not part of the underlying nature of “things in themselves”, the noumenon, to which we can have no access.

Yet according to Arthur Schopenhauer there is a way to explore “things in themselves” – and that is to look inside one’s own self. He did – and claimed to glimpse ultimate reality in a unifying, homogeneous, ghastly impulse, which he called the “will”.

That’s all well and good, I can hear Sheldon say, but philosophical argument is no match for “Rock, paper, scissors, lizard, Spock”. Just think what these great men could have achieved if they’d spent less time navel-gazing and more time concentrating on comic books.

(That’s another Bazinga! Sheldon is slowly unravelling the mystery of humour and sarcasm, which for him is much more difficult than string theory.)

There is a serious point here though. Are space-time and consciousness entirely explainable through material realism or do we need something else?

At the sub-atomic level consciousness becomes a hot topic – both for quantum physicists (cf the much misunderstood Schrodinger’s cat) and for neuroscientists, some of whom equate awareness with neuronal activity.

Look at the circularity. We are told that our thinking arises in some unexplained manner from the activity of electrons in the brain synapses. Yet electrons themselves are probability waves that exist as localised particles only when they are measured or observed – and what is observation but an act of consciousness?

So the nature of consciousness is clearly wide open. Is it primitive? Or derivative? Or in some ways, both? To my mind, mathematical thinking seems universal, elemental, fundamental and timeless; while our sense world could be “emergent” – but who knows from what?

Kant and Schopenhauer agree that, without an observer, the universe is devoid of space and time. But perhaps our misapprehension of existence goes even deeper.

In his ontological philosophy, Martin Heidegger says we have forgotten what it is to exist – what “being” is. Primarily, we are not subjects trapped inside ourselves looking out at a world of external objects. Rather, we are beings existing in a world of being. Most of the time we are too busy getting on with our activities to pay much attention to things like tables, chairs and door knobs. We pay them full attention only when things go wrong or we feel in contemplative mood. The rest of the time such objects have a sort of transparency for us.

Now that I’ve had my mind expanded by Leibniz, Spinoza, Kant, Schopenhauer and Heidegger, not to mention Sheldon, the Big Bang seems rather beside the (single, dimensionless) point unless hooked up to our present perception and thought. If our universe existed on its own for several billion years before conscious life, it lacked the reference points that human minds bring to it: there was no sense of relative scale; or of time passing. Time might as well run through such a place all at once – on extreme fast-forward.

Did the Big Bang make a noise? This is a cosmological variant of that ancient conundrum, “When a tree falls over in the woods and nobody’s there, does it make a sound?”

The answer to the Big Bang version of this question is “Yes” … but only because we are still “hearing” the noise today in the form of background microwave radiation. I’ve always been convinced that the answer with respect to trees is “No”, provided no one left a recording device in the woods.

So back to Mr Bradt’s primordial questioning. Is it possible for there to be an existence that is non-spatial and non-temporal? I’d say that, even though we sometimes think spatially, any idea “inside” our minds – such as “justice”, “pi” or “Sheldon’s mother” – is not actually extended in Euclidean space or in non-Euclidean space-time. Yet our non-extended minds somehow endow the universe with extension, duration and scale as well as separateness or objectivity. The world “out there” is neither big nor small, old nor young, except for our perception. Take our emergent sense of appearances out of the equation and space-time loses its scaffolding, like closing a children’s pop-up book.

I hope you had a happy “Star Wars Day” yesterday, Mr Bradt. May the 4th be with you!