Big Bang

As the genial documentary "The Big Bang" opens, its director is wooing a money man across a dinner table with that patented combination of cool and fervor that constitutes the perfect pitch. The filmmaker may be a little fuzzy about his project, but it came to him at the Shangri La Hotel when he realized he knew how it all started. "How what started?" the backer asks, carefully. "The cosmos ," the director expands, "with the orgasmic explosion of God."

Mikolaj Miszczak, better known to his admirers as Hamburger Mike, has been glum lately. He has been stalled, stymied and forced to wait--a process, if it can be called that, that is antithetical to his fast-track nature. For the moment, about all he can do is watch the money roll in. It's driving him nuts.

"They have found the Holy Grail of cosmology," an elated astrophysicist said of this week's announcement that there are wrinkles in the fabric of the universe. The wrinkles are important to the theory that the universe, as intelligent life on Earth knows it, started with a Big Bang. It was, the theory says, an explosion of something smaller than the point of a needle that in the end was to be responsible for all of the matter in the universe.

For the first time, scientists have observed long-sought relics of the "Big Bang," the controversial theory that the universe was created by a primeval explosion 15 billion years ago. These relics--massive wisps of gas more than 500 million light-years long--are the largest and oldest structures ever observed, astrophysicist George Smoot of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory said Thursday at a meeting of the American Physical Society in Washington.

They're as American as Mom, apple pie, and the Stars and Stripes -- and the last thing you'd expect at a swanky night out at the opera. Except, that is, if it's Mozart's "The Marriage of Figaro." Ending with a literal bang -- fireworks -- Los Angeles Opera's new production of this 18th century buffa masterpiece is dazzling audiences at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion (there are four more performances) not only with silver-throated singing but with eye-popping pyrotechnics.

Even before Margaret Geller revealed evidence last week for a new concept about star clusters that may revolutionize man's perception of the universe, she became fascinated with bubbles. "I looked at bubbles everywhere," Geller said. "In the bath water, in the dishpan, everywhere." Geller's latest fascination with bubbles grew out of new sky charts of distant galaxies that she and a colleague are preparing at the Whipple Observatory in Arizona.

Fireworks displays celebrating the Fourth of July will be held today throughout San Diego County. Here are some of the festivities and their locations: * Camp Pendleton's Morale, Welfare and Recreation Department is sponsoring a fireworks display from the jetty at the border of Camp Pendleton and Oceanside Harbor at 9 p.m. Music on Q106-FM (106.5) will be broadcast in conjunction with the display.

A Delta 2 rocket carrying a NASA telescope lifted off Thursday on a three-year, $204-million mission to look for the relics of the "big bang" that many believe brought the universe into being. The 12-story blue-and-white rocket roared away from its Cape Canaveral launch pad through a fountain of fire and smoke at 8:44 a.m. PDT, punching through layers of thin, wispy clouds and arcing out across the Atlantic Ocean.

General Motors Corp. today reported a $2-billion loss for the third quarter, including a onetime charge of $2.1 billion for closing four assembly plants and related expenses. The restructuring move was applauded by industry analysts, who said it was the needed "big bang" to make the world's biggest auto maker more profitable. They had expected the charge to total anywhere from $700 million to $2.5 billion. The loss amounts to $3.54 per common share. GM had earned $516.

Last year, astrophysicist George Smoot of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory got a very important message. From the beginning of time. Three weeks ago, he revealed that message, and the world, many people believe, changed forever. Smoot and his colleagues reported that they had detected microwave signals from the oldest and largest structures in the universe, faint relics of the Big Bang, the seminal explosion that created the universe and everything in it 15 billion years ago.