Frivolous #2: When I'm 103

 

What does it mean that there has never been a beginning to existence, to the universe? (Religious people: Stand in the corner for a big “time-out.” Saying “God” doesn’t answer any questions.) It means there is no such thing as time. Of course there isn’t. Nothing “flows,” or “flows in one direction” (forward). Stuff simply is. We count how long it stays because we stay long enough to count it. Everything moves. All the tiny parts of an atom move; rocket ships move; photons move. When parts flip around inside an atom, do we go nutty or lofty about time? No. Then shut up about time in big things.

Bertrand Russell commented on the difficulty we have accepting that the universe may have always existed: “The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our imagina­tion.” We imagine beginnings and ends. When we can accept that everything is eternal, an even more curious issue protrudes: Why is everything so small? This refers to all the ridicu­lously tiny pieces of matter, smaller and smaller that have been discovered or posited. That’s hard to grasp. If there was, at one point in the end­less vastness, an explosion, could it really result in a possibly infinite number of parti­cles all the same substance, all the same size? Maybe there have been so many “big bang” explosions that everything keeps getting pulverized littler and littler. So many incarnations of the universe, each teensier and less fathomable than the last.

I like to picture that there is no such thing as time. It’s pleasant to picture the broad table set for­ever, unmoving. Stable. Always here for us. When I lay me in my bed of death, I like thinking that the bed of All will always be there, beneath me.