It can perhaps be a little stark, but equally profound and
humbling to at least once in a while, consider that the distance between us and the mites
on a leaf is likely far closer than the distance between us and
understanding the universe as it actually is.
Of course, we aren’t clueless. We have come exceptionally
far, relatively speaking. Unlike any other living thing, we are
not only aware that there is a universe that surrounds and
inhabits us, but we are also able to create models and equations
out of it that have allowed us to extract understanding and
fundamental laws of nature from the very surface of nature
itself. However, despite our profound abilities and
achievements, we still have some of the most basic, essential
questions left unresolved on the table of everything. Unknowns
that permeate into the quintessence of our existence and our
experience of our existence, that no one has been able to figure
out since our start of it all. Question 1; What is time?
At a young age we are taught how to tell time and off we go
flying through it, trying to keep up with it and use it as best
we can. For the most part, time exists fairly casually in the
background of our lives. However, to paraphrase the early
theologian philosopher, St. Augustine, when someone asks what
time it is, we know, but when someone asks what time is, no one
has any idea. Starting from the big bang, everything moved
outwardly through time and space in an increasingly
complex and disorderly manner. By way of the second law of thermodynamics
we know that everything moves towards entropy. From order
to disorder. This creates what is known as the arrow of time,
which as far as know, only moves forward. Unlike in the dimensions
of space, in which you can drive somewhere, realize you
forgot something at home, and then turn around to go back and
get it, you obviously can’t turn around and go backwards in time.
What you forget in the past stays there.
In the 17th century, Isaac Newton proposed that time not only moves forward but also
moves at an absolute, fixed rate, throughout all of the universe. This makes perfect sense,
as it is how we intuitively experience and understand time. Your minute is just as long
and just as short as everyone else’s. However, a couple hundred years later, in
the early 20th century, Albert Einstein provided his theory of special relativity, which disproved
Newton by revealing that time is far more malleable. According to Einstein’s theory,
time is in fact not constant or real in the way that we are intuitively accustom to. Rather,
it is personal, relative, and partly perceptual. As in, everybody has their own experience
of time and the rate at
which time passes can change depending on what someone is doing
and where someone is. This, however, only becomes noticeable in
extreme instances, like near black holes or approaching the
speed of light, wherein both cases, time slows down.
Although profound and revolutionary to our understanding of
time, this still doesn’t answer what time really is or why we
appear to only move forward in it or why time is a dimension at
all, if it even is; leaving room for plenty of additional
theoretical models and arguments to be made. There are valid
theories of the universe that don’t include time as a dimension,
like the theory proposed by an equation known as The Wheeler
DeWitt Equation. Other theories suggest that time can be
nonlinear and go back on itself at the end of itself, in a sort
of loop of displaced cause and effect. Or, congruent with
Einstein’s theories, all moments are occurring at the same time,
just like all locations in space are occurring at the same time,
and the perception or sense that there is a past, present, or
future is merely an illusion as a result of our continuous
forward direction through it. However despite our movement
through it, the timeline of all moments in all directions, past
present and future, is always there, with no real beginning or
end. Of course, the point here is we don’t know.
We simply live with time, experiencing every moment through
it, coordinating
every activity on it, and allowing it to pressurize our every
decision and sensibility. And yet, it could merely be an
illusion created by the brain’s feeble attempt to understand
something that it can’t. To quote Einstein, “...we do not observe
nature as it actually exists, but nature exposed to our methods
of perception.” Question two; what is gravity?
In an ironically similar string of events, Isaac Newton
proposed what is known as the law of universal gravitation in
his same work that argued for absolute time. In his theory,
Newton explained that every particle attracts every other
particle with a force proportional to the product of their
masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance
between the center of each particle. In simpler terms, objects
with mass have a force of gravity and move towards each other in
space dependent on the relationship of their masses and distance
from each other. Some years later, again, Einstein proved Newton
was wrong about this as well with his later, updated
version of relativity, known as the theory of general
relativity. In this, Einstein discovered that gravity is not the
force between two objects but is actually the result of the
mass of an object distorting what is known space-time, which
is the combination of the 3 dimensions of space and the 1 dimension
of time, creating
one singular fabric of the universe. As a result, gravity works
somewhat and very metaphorically like putting a bowling ball in
the middle of sheet pulled tight on all ends. The bowling ball
would cause the sheet to dip down towards the center and curve
around it. If then, a tennis ball was added onto the sheet,
since the tennis ball has less mass, it would gravitate towards
the bowling ball, but only because of the distortion or bending
of the sheet. This completely revolutionized our understanding
of gravitation and the universe as a whole, however,
it doesn’t answer what gravity actually is. We can measure
it and calculate it, but unlike other forces, gravity has no
particle, so we cant know what carries it out. We know that mass
creates a gravitational effect but no one knows why
mass creates a gravitational affect. It just does. All the
galaxies and solar systems. The earth in orbit. Us on earth.
It all just seems to pull together with no discernable explanation,
so far as we can tell, yet.
Question 3; Why is there something rather than nothing?
We know that everything that’s anything is made up of
matter and energy, being interrelated aspects of the same thing.
The first law of thermodynamics tells us that energy can
neither be created nor destroyed. However if this is true, of
course, what created it in the first place?
It appears that either something had to have come from
nothing, or something has always been. In the case that something has always been,
if time can be nonlinear and infinitely regresses in a loop, going backwards on itself at the
end of itself, it would be possible that there is no beginning or end of the universe at
all, but a continuation of the same thing, as if the universe were breathing in and out,
filling up its lungs with everything, and then emptying them back out, over and over.
Or similarly, everything is, was, and will be across space-time always for eternity.
Every moment and location has a coordinate on the map of space-time and, regardless of
where we are on it; the entire map exists always at same time, forever. However in both
cases, if something has always been something, where did that something come from. Who or
what made it? How can anything be anything without having been made by something else?
If the universe is entirely based on cause and effect, which it appears to be, how could
there be no first cause for there to be an effect.
Alternatively, in what is known as quantum field theory,
physicists have also found that particles known as virtual
particles can come into existence from apparent nothingness.
Which is to say, it is perhaps possible that a feature of
nothing is to create something. However, if a feature of nothing
is to create something, how can it be nothing? And if nothing
isn’t nothing, what is it and what made it? Even if one
subscribes to the notion of a god or gods, that’s fine, but that
doesn’t resolve the question of where a god came from and what
or who made him or her or it. Everything ultimately brings us
back to the same question. How can anything come from nothing?
Or something be infinite? And neither concept seem to concur
with any human sensibilities, meaning there is some mystery of
everything that our brains can’t seem to comprehend, as if the
rules of the game were made of logic, but the reason for the
game were made of something else. The only truth is, of course, no matter what
someone says or how they say it, nobody has any idea better
than anybody else as to what is really going on below their
feet, inside their brain, or above their head.
Maybe at some point in the future, we, or some iteration of
us, will know precisely how everything works and why with one
little equation. Maybe Newton will be wrong, and Einstein will
be wrong, and thousands of other Einstein’s of the future will
be wrong, until someone somehow isn’t. And maybe, for some
reason, that’s where we are heading. However, perhaps what matters is less about
what it is or why it is, but that it is. That during this
position of time and space and in this form of matter, we can look
into the nature of the nature of everything and see that nothing
is simple and
everything is insane and that the only thing more insane would
be to waste it by never marveling at it. Never appreciating that
we experience time, whatever it is, in a way that allows us to
experience it at all. That the affects of earth’s gravity is
just strong enough keep us on it, but not so much that we can’t
move around. That the exact structure of matter, with their
exact forces, formed just perfectly enough over billions of
years to allow us to emerge out of the darkness for a little,
able to do this right now. Able to enjoy the apparent magic show
of everything, contorted
just right for us.