That’s how long it took for the universe to get started, or even less. So say really smart astrophysicists after having detected “gravitational waves” left over from the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago. Some say it might be one of the biggest scientific discoveries of all time.

To which I say, wow, hallelujah, and what was that again?

First of all, if no band has yet taken the name of “Gravitational Waves,” I hereby claim it should the Honeytones ever disband. (That will never happen, but I’ve still got dibs.)

Second of all, this is mind-blowing news of the first order, and of much higher quality than most of what passes for such. For this news points to how we actually got here, or, as one helpful video with a lovely British accent puts it, the beginning of everything.

But is it really the beginning of everything? Or if it is, what was there before the beginning? And who began it?

That is, what or who could take a “submicroscopic speck of primordial energy,” as The New York Times put it, and blow it up in the space of a trillionth of a trillionth etc., thereby starting a universe that now measures 14 billion light years across? And that’s just what we can see.

The discovery of little swirls in the universal background of microwave radiation – don’t ask me to explain it – by scientists camped out at the South Pole is breathtaking news. It’s almost like someone took a selfie of Genesis (the book not the band).

Reporters struggle to explain it to us mere laypeople. It’s like the ripples of sand left by the waves. It’s like seeing the same coffee cup cooled at the same rate wherever you look. It’s like a 40-minute jazz odyssey by Spinal Tap (that one is my contribution).

But what does it mean, exactly? Does it mean that the universe, or the un-universe, just sat there cold and dead until one day it decided to snap to life? If so, how long was it cold and dead before it snapped to life? And just how does cold, dead matter “decide” to snap to life?

With apologies to Neil deGrasse Tyson, who explains such things much more elegantly in the reboot of “Cosmos” now showing on Fox, these questions get my brain working overtime. These gravitational waves pull me toward the idea that there must have been a creator who got the waves rolling.

I was roundly slapped for posing that really unradical thought in my recent column on “Cosmos,” by an online commenter who said I might as well say a pink unicorn created all the flatulence on Earth. (Clearly this man has not read the Gnostic Gospel of the Pink Unicorn.) But Tyson himself, an agnostic, admits science doesn’t know the answer to Where It All Came From.

Certainly, a universe created by chance is at least as implausible as a universe created by a creator. The latter makes more sense to me. As the Jewish physicist and author Gerald Schroeder had posited, the universe could have started as an idea – God’s idea.

I don’t know about you, but to me a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth brings to mind a familiar phrase: Let there be light.