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| "Does it matter much, in the great scheme of things, if you and I close our eyes and close them for good? If the particles that comprise us, supporting our tiny sense of being here at the centre of space and time, are scattered to wherever they came from in the first place, among the indifferent particles around? In this vast organisation we're all nobodies. We shall all of us go in the end - and what will have changed? The number of quarks in the universe will still be the same. A curious little fleck of foam that wind and tide raised for a few moments on a few square centimetres of the great ocean will have vanished back in to the waters. The universe will go on as if we had never been. We both know that as surely as we know anything. But now we come to the oddest thing of all about our relationship with the universe : we both know the opposite of this is true. We know that if we go, so will everything. What is the universe, after all? Vastly big in its totality - and vastly small in its details. What makes it big, what makes it small? You and I do, by standing where we stand, by being 1.80 metres tall, by living for three score years and ten. We have some notion of how vastly bigger it is than ourselves, how vastly smaller, only because we've laid our metre-rule against it. Only because we've put our stopwatches on it. It's big, it's small, it's so many billion light years across and so many years old because you and I and some of our friends say it is. If we weren't here in the audience, comparing and measuring, gasping and applauding, the whole show would have gone for nothing. The universe would not be several billion light years across, or four centimetres, or any other distance. It would not be odd or awe-inspiring - or even banal. It would have no characteristics at all. If it had no characteristics then it what sense would it be anything? In what sense would it exist? The lifespan of the omega meson would not be 10 -22 seconds or twelve centuries or any other length of time. Here would not be here. Now would not be now. And if here is not here, nor now now, there is not there, nor then then. There would be no is, no was, no will be. If no is, no was, no will be, then no passage of time. So we are perhaps not after all such nobodies. We are not for nothing." Love stuff like that. | ||
| Entry 204 of 431 |
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