The Cosmic Clocks
Are we in an ordered universe, or a disordered disheveled one? Could one or the other be certain, or both, or neither?
We can parse much of reality into mathematics, quantify it. But when the language meets its limitations, what then? When we reach the limit of exponentials, we simply find ourselves confronted with a negative, a decimal where things begin to reverse themselves, a void on either side of zero.
Nature is quite clever and is not about to reveal all its secrets. We are a silly specie content to figure out our surroundings when all the while the cosmic clocks are ticking. We try and count their cadence and are arrested by the spaces between the measure.
It is no one’s purview to define our nature since the more we discover, the more there is to discover, and there will be no end to that. The greater our advances the greater is nature’s retreat from conquest. We are infants in a swirling maelstrom of curiosity, and what could be better?
Maybe by the time we tire of our fruitless attempts to conquer nature, we will be on the other side of the void, and nature will relinquish some part of itself to further nourish our restlessness. An end to struggle and an ease to our anxieties. Round and round it goes since round and round it must. Anxiety is what drives us to create, so we will create and create and create without end with nature always a step ahead, always another corner to round, always another horizon.
Planck’s constant holds us prisoner, and Einstein’s relativity keeps us chained, quantum physics bedraggles our mind and string theory, well…
A unified theory of the universe might be unreachable simply because the universe is already unified, but elusive. Warp speed ain’t coming any time soon, so long as classical physics apply. e=mc2 means the faster an object travels the more energy required and the more energy required the more mass there is until nearing the speed of light that mass approaches infinity. Beyond the speed of light, well…
Quantum physics demonstrates how motion backward and forward in time is not only possible, but probable since quantum physics reduces everything to probability. Schrodinger’s theoretical cat demonstrates that not only can a thing be but can also not be (simultaneously) and is furthermore directly related to the observer. This explains why no one has ever seen a photon or boson (look, and it is not there but somewhere else) let alone an electron, neutron, or proton (fermions) and consensus leans toward all of these particles not being particles at all, but wave forms that phase change at measured intervals or when colliding with other particles (wave forms) or time.
Changelings. The fury cat you see before you might be something else when you’re not looking, it certainly doesn’t refer to itself as a cat and its world is not yours or mine and so we have no authority over it when not observed.
You might ask how any of this is possible; how can a thing both be and not be?
That is exactly what we are saying, and it appears to be the case. Relativity exists only because Mr. Einstein envisioned it and made it repeatable thereby satisfying the strict rules of science. It could have been anyone else following a trail of Bonafide logic laid down through a history of trial and error, but it took Albert Einstein to bring it into reality. Is relativity real, or one set of possible outcomes within an infinite number of possible outcomes? He did after all claim that God did not roll dice and could not surrender to probability. He took that to the grave. That’s conviction.
But the universe doesn’t concern itself with the affairs of Mr. Einstein or anyone else for that matter, since Nature is objective and favors no one.