My take on life Part 1: The Infinitesimals
If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is:
Infinite.-William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Clichéd ideas are not necessarily ideas that do not deserve a second look. May be these are ideas that have been presented for a second look more often than once and have, in due course of time, become clichéd. More relevant here, is my notion that clichés are an unassuming and quiet a safe way to start.
The dimensions involved in this cliché are beyond your imagination, and mine. That which is beyond human imagination is only barely with in the limits of human methods of quantification. But as always they have tried and they came up with some numbers. I have used the numbers.
There are an estimated 125 billion galaxies each with billions of stars. The Milky Way is one out of these 125 billion. Two-thirds of the way from the center of this galaxy is an ordinary star which if not for the accident of life on one of its planets would have faded… from ordinary, to oblivion. It might not be that fortunate now.
Then there is the Earth – home to a bewildering variety of life forms, tens of millions of species, some still thriving, most extinct, one of them ours –Homo sapiens.
A few of the over six and a half billion homo sapiens live on the planet, the rest manage to survive… all of them in the same world, yet each in its own world… six and a half billion human brains - collecting facts, churning numbers, feeling emotions, moving limbs, reacting, over reacting, interacting, communicating, misunderstanding, fighting, dying…. one of them my own and one of them yours.
They say the universe is over 10 billion years old, our Earth 4.5 billion years old. They say there’s been a Big Bang and they say there might be a Big Crunch. Thankfully, they accept that they cannot, while working under assumptions that are considered reasonable in this day and age, deduce anything about the state of matter and energy before the Big Bang or after the Big Crunch (if there is one).
[If the universe does not end in a Big Crunch it will, according to the second law of Thermodynamics definitely end in a gradual heat death… a state of maximum entropy. But will time end if the universe “dies”? Will time cease to exist if there are no clocks to tick? I don’t think so. I believe that time is as an infinite entity. I believe that one cannot link the beginning or end of time to the presence or absence of matter. But it is only a belief. I also believe that space is infinite.]
They have found no reasonable bound on space yet nor is any one expecting to find one. Whether space ever ends is as yet an unanswered question and probably will remain so for a long time to come. Here is the catch: assuming that the universe is ‘x’ billion years old, we will not be able to see beyond ‘x’ billion light years, for nothing travels faster than light (or so says Einstein). In other words, the limit of the distance that can be directly observed by us is the age of the universe times the speed of light. In effect, the longer we manage to survive the farther we’ll be able to see. If time is infinite and if we do manage to survive forever (without finding a way around our current speed limit) we might find that space too is infinite in its extent.
Without going into whether or not (cutting the crap that is … ) the extents of space and time are truly infinite I’ll limit myself to making the point that with respect to dimensions that effect us and are influenced by us, they can be approximated to be so.
Math speak: the fraction of space occupied by any finite body in an infinite extent of space is zero (same goes for time as well).
So, there you have it in a nutshell - In the larger scheme of things you and I, Gandhi and Kennedy, the whole planet and the solar system, for that matter any entity occupying finite space and time are all reduced to mere zeros. Well if not zeros in an infinite universe then infinitesimals in a universe that approaches infinite dimensions of space and time. We are the infinitesimals. A conclusion each one of us has consciously or unconsciously, made and ignored, for the conclusion is as unsettling as it is fascinating.
That our existential realm is infinitesimal is information that I, in spite of repeatedly being able to establish its veracity, have never really been able to accept. Something in side me stirs in protest whenever my mind tries to internalise the knowledge of our 'infinitesimal-ness'. It is as if I've been programmed to look away from the obvious, to turn a deaf ear to voices of reason, screaming at me from the farthest reaches of the cosmos. I try to live in ignorance and bliss but I fail. I try to forget, I can't. The human mind is a bitch of the most unreliable kind - it forgets what it should not and delves on what it should be forgetting.
The dimensions involved in this cliché are beyond your imagination, and mine. That which is beyond human imagination is only barely with in the limits of human methods of quantification. But as always they have tried and they came up with some numbers. I have used the numbers.
There are an estimated 125 billion galaxies each with billions of stars. The Milky Way is one out of these 125 billion. Two-thirds of the way from the center of this galaxy is an ordinary star which if not for the accident of life on one of its planets would have faded… from ordinary, to oblivion. It might not be that fortunate now.
Then there is the Earth – home to a bewildering variety of life forms, tens of millions of species, some still thriving, most extinct, one of them ours –Homo sapiens.
A few of the over six and a half billion homo sapiens live on the planet, the rest manage to survive… all of them in the same world, yet each in its own world… six and a half billion human brains - collecting facts, churning numbers, feeling emotions, moving limbs, reacting, over reacting, interacting, communicating, misunderstanding, fighting, dying…. one of them my own and one of them yours.
They say the universe is over 10 billion years old, our Earth 4.5 billion years old. They say there’s been a Big Bang and they say there might be a Big Crunch. Thankfully, they accept that they cannot, while working under assumptions that are considered reasonable in this day and age, deduce anything about the state of matter and energy before the Big Bang or after the Big Crunch (if there is one).
[If the universe does not end in a Big Crunch it will, according to the second law of Thermodynamics definitely end in a gradual heat death… a state of maximum entropy. But will time end if the universe “dies”? Will time cease to exist if there are no clocks to tick? I don’t think so. I believe that time is as an infinite entity. I believe that one cannot link the beginning or end of time to the presence or absence of matter. But it is only a belief. I also believe that space is infinite.]
They have found no reasonable bound on space yet nor is any one expecting to find one. Whether space ever ends is as yet an unanswered question and probably will remain so for a long time to come. Here is the catch: assuming that the universe is ‘x’ billion years old, we will not be able to see beyond ‘x’ billion light years, for nothing travels faster than light (or so says Einstein). In other words, the limit of the distance that can be directly observed by us is the age of the universe times the speed of light. In effect, the longer we manage to survive the farther we’ll be able to see. If time is infinite and if we do manage to survive forever (without finding a way around our current speed limit) we might find that space too is infinite in its extent.
Without going into whether or not (cutting the crap that is … ) the extents of space and time are truly infinite I’ll limit myself to making the point that with respect to dimensions that effect us and are influenced by us, they can be approximated to be so.
Math speak: the fraction of space occupied by any finite body in an infinite extent of space is zero (same goes for time as well).
So, there you have it in a nutshell - In the larger scheme of things you and I, Gandhi and Kennedy, the whole planet and the solar system, for that matter any entity occupying finite space and time are all reduced to mere zeros. Well if not zeros in an infinite universe then infinitesimals in a universe that approaches infinite dimensions of space and time. We are the infinitesimals. A conclusion each one of us has consciously or unconsciously, made and ignored, for the conclusion is as unsettling as it is fascinating.
That our existential realm is infinitesimal is information that I, in spite of repeatedly being able to establish its veracity, have never really been able to accept. Something in side me stirs in protest whenever my mind tries to internalise the knowledge of our 'infinitesimal-ness'. It is as if I've been programmed to look away from the obvious, to turn a deaf ear to voices of reason, screaming at me from the farthest reaches of the cosmos. I try to live in ignorance and bliss but I fail. I try to forget, I can't. The human mind is a bitch of the most unreliable kind - it forgets what it should not and delves on what it should be forgetting.
check 1
Posted by
Anonymous |
10:14 pm, December 27, 2005
I hear ya my friend. U sound like Carl Sagan now. Check it out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnFMrNdj1yY&feature=youtube_gdata
Posted by
Indepdendent Analyst |
6:30 pm, January 14, 2010