Here’s what I’m doing with this blog now: I’m just going to write whatever is on mind. This is it.
I’ve been reading Carlo Rovelli’s gorgeous Seven Brief Lessons on Physics and have been caught on one part, of one lesson in particular, where we read about observations and ideas concerning black holes.
These form around suns which are collapsing into themselves. The black hole obscures our view, but if we were to peel away the inky veil we would see, inside, that the sun continues to collapse. Smaller and smaller it shrinks whilst it maintains its mass.
But how long can this go on for?
Can something shrink infinitely?
The theory loop quantum gravity (which exists to try and marry the conflicting worlds of general relativity and quantum mechanics) would tell us that once the sun reaches a certain point – the size of an atom perhaps – it rebounds. To a theoretical observer inside the black hole this would happen very quickly. For us, lightyears away and far separated from the devastating temporal impact of the black hole’s gravity, it would appear to take billions of years. This would explain why the black holes we observe seem to be doing very little: ‘a black hole is a rebounding star seen in extreme slow motion.’
The consequences of this theory are multiple and mostly beyond my comprehension. But it leads us to the hypotheses that the Big Bang, the creation of the known universe, may well have been a Big Bounce. Some previous iteration of existence may have compressed, with space and time collapsing under its own mass, ceasing to exist for some inexplicable period, before rebounding into the primordial cosmos which would eventually give rise to…well, everything. Including us.
We are a tiny stitch on the fabric of the universe. In decreasing magnitude: the Earth, life itself, the human species, and you and I, do not register on a cosmic scale. Even time and space has a beginning and an end.
There are not enough years in our species to ever get a grasp on the ultimate nature of the universe. Secrets will linger in the vastness long after the human race is dust.
But the questions are the fun bit, at least.
If a universe preceded ours, and it consisted of the same stuff: how similar would it look to our universe?
It has the same ingredients.
Could it be…identical?
And if the parts and pieces are identical is it arrogant to assume that we would be any different?
If Earth should exist again, if life should grow, if homo sapiens should grow to call itself Humanity – how closely would that history mirror our own?
Would you, or I, exist?
Would we make the exact same decisions?
Live the same lives?
Or maybe, when you reduce the entire universe to the size of an atom and explode it out again in a existence spanning wave, it is remixed. The same things, different places. New planets, new stars. A whole new arrangement of the cosmic order. Vodka martini shaken, vodka martini stirred – same ingredients, different flavour.
Anyway –
That’s what I’ve been thinking about. Thanks for reading. Take a song for your trouble.
run into words 