Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Zero and One

What fun. The political landscape is simmering and becoming boring and I've been working on a column for a couple of days, so I thought that I'd get philosophical:

What is the nature of the universe?

Zero and One.

At the beginning was there nothing.

Had to have been, eh?

Well, yes. Then...define nothing. What did it look like? What quality did nothing have?

No qualities, you say.

Then what is nothing? Was there one nothing? Or were there lots of nothings?

No Qualities!

Then nothing is undefineable.

Was there everything? What is everything? Everything including nothing?

Everything that could be? or Everything that is?

Where did everything come from? Nothing?

Most people give up. Scientists push back the veil of the known and try to guess. Though there guessing just leads into new problems. Before the big bang, we were sitting on two different Branes that bumped into each other.

What's a brane? Space/Time itself. What made the branes? Where did they come from? Don't be silly, what kind of question is that?

So I believe in zero/one.

The universe, now, is just as much nothing as it was. The universe, now, is everything it is going to be. Which is very little.

There is no truth, only experience. That is...the universe is always becoming. This state of becoming is called "reality". However, that is a misnomer. I would say that we exist on a bubble where "something" happens. This something is connected, vaguely, to what went on before, and what is possible.

Space/Time is possibility. It is a canvas. Gravity is the paint on the canvas. A folding of space time. Wrinkles. A dynamic nothing would fold back on itself. Examine itself. Define itself. Become...

That's what we do. We are nothing examining itself, or everything that nothing can conjure from itself. Which of course is nothing.

We might exist.

This is why we get strange events on either extreme. Black holes where gravity rules! Black holes nearly are! It requires an infinite amount of nothing to make something. Something that is creating itself out of nothing. And it is defined as the most destructive thing of all in a way that almost describes nothing for it is the ultimate paradox. A great nothing. A nothing that exists!

The same thing happens at the other end. Particles that slip into nothingness. Impossible to define except by the fact that they move. One must guess where they are. Time and space seem to break down as they are barely defined.

In between, we live in reality. A "slow-motion" version of either extreme. We cannot flit through the universe, yet we are more defined. We do not "exist" but have an understanding of existence and live in a bubble, as it were, travelling through space time. Slowing things down so that we can grasp them.

The universe is an eye blink. All time is here and gone, but that geometry slows it down. Form is all there is. Form captures. Form defines. We are a geometry of nothing.

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