The Unfriendly Space-Time Continuum

The world isn’t made of things. It’s not made of objects… The notion that big things are made of little things, quantum theory doesn’t describe the world that way. Big things aren’t made of little things. They are made of entities whose attributes aren’t there when you don’t look, but become there when you do look. The world exists when we don’t look at it in some strange state that is indescribable, and then when we look at it, it becomes absolutely ordinary, as though someone were trying to pull something over our eyes. The world is an illusion. ~ Nick Herbert

As I sat in my car one day waiting to join a roundabout while a vehicle went past me, I began thinking that as much as I knew that an infinite combination of events could have conspired to cause me to be somewhere else doing something else, I was there at that specific point in time. That event could only happen once in the entire history of the universe and will never be repeated again. Was it inevitable that the event would occur?

As Cosmologists and theoretical Physicists grapple with life’s difficult questions about why and how we are here, I am sobered by the thought that thousands of generations have come before me and millions will come after me. As the human race advances, sometime in the future I will be forgotten by everyone including my own descendants. Even these words I type today, captured by a server somewhere will one day be erased. The earth will continue spinning on its axis and revolving around the sun for billions of years to come until the sun finally runs out of energy in about 4.5 billion years, turning into a white dwarf.

More stars will form, more planets will emerge, perhaps intelligent life will arise all over the universe but it cannot last since nature has a built in mechanism of creation and destruction. Perhaps zillions of years into the future, the entire universe will collapse in a Big Crunch and start all over again. We may be in the million such cycle with more to come. Who knows.

All I know is that I have an axe to grind with the space-time continuum.