Life had no single point of conception. That is, not existing in one moment yet arisen in the next. However, along a given timeframe, say a few hundred thousand years, this observation is valid.
The parallels with quantum states of uncertainty are exquisite. The exact positions in time and space of the particles that compose us are unknowable. If quantum states bind the lower levels of the universe together, then at an underlying level must empirical thinking have no sway. Notions of causality, constancy of matter, even life and death are irrelevancies. They are like a map of the subway in the desert – They cannot describe the quantum state. There, the empiricism of “being” and “not being” have no meaning.
Nathan winced and rubbed the back of his head. He maintained a passing knowledge of the concept.
Draw an atom for me, Nathan.
A silver pen slid from an aperture in the book’s spine. Nathan chose a spot below his own name and dutifully scribed a cluster of neutrons and protons orbited by an electron. The moment his nib lifted from the paper, the page shuffled away.
Good. You have an electron spinning around the nucleus. It spins unimaginably fast; so fast indeed I will not grasp for meaningless superlatives. It occupies certain orbits around the nucleus. Do you follow me thus far?
Nodding, Nathan thought this all far below him. Another page hove into view.
Excellent. Now hold the word “spinning” in your head for me.
Nathan did.
Hold it fast!
The Knight thumped his breastplate loudly, and the boy jumped.
Paradox again, Nathan, that sense of ceaseless motion. Consider now that the electron is in every possible position of its orbit at the same time.
“Like a band of metal,” said Nathan.
No. The book read. That is an incorrect comparison. Metal implies solidity, inertia. The electron is still very much in motion, my lad. It just so happens to be everywhere at once. Do you watch car races?
“No,” said Nathan.
The steeled face cocked to one side.
Nevertheless, you are no doubt familiar with the concept. A race-car that is travelling in such a way that it is simultaneously visible to an observer half-way around the track as to one at the starting line.
Nathan embraced the thought. Now he recalled a discussion more fully, inevitably Jeremy's derision of the layman's concept of ...
"The Quantum Leap!" said the boy.
Good boy. Can you explain it?
Nathan told of how the electron would transfer between orbits instantaneously, and never occupy the space between.
A more succinct violation of Einsteinian physics is difficult to imagine. Thus uncertainty holds the universe in thrall.
The Knight made a gesture of throat-cutting.
Laplace's Demon is long dead.
"Laplace's Demon?" asked Nathan.
Imagine an entity who knew the exact state and location of all things at this very moment. The divination of all fates would then be his, no future beyond his ken. However, these smallest pieces of reality defy observation, almost wilfully so.
Nathan knelt and dragged a stick through the grass at his feet.
Man has sought knowledge of all things, as is his birthright, but there are things unknowable, obscurations of a totality so absolute as to defy our reason.
Nathan spotted a grey mote where the desolation touched the sky in the far distance.
A property of the quantum state is entanglement. When sub-atomic particles share the same wavelength, they are said to be so.
A small tremor reached Nathan through the soles of his sneakers.
Once entangled, you can separate the particles across an immeasurably large distance, even across the breadth of space, and when you change the properties of one, its twin is changed instantaneously, faster than light and time can catch hold of it.
Nathan wanted to study the figure in the distance again, but this line of thought held him.
So if all matter were once one in that point of infinite density at the Big Bang, it surely must still be so. Quantum skeins link all particles like the warp of a weaver’s loom, indivisible within and without their host atoms, stretching back in space and time to commonality. Your kin are truly stars and dust-showers hovering in the frigid vast.
Nathan looked up from the book. The central swelling of the Knight’s visor formed a squat cone that suggested a canine muzzle pressing against the steel. The boy felt a little light-headed.
“Death,” said Nathan, “I want a sandwich, please. And a can of cola too.”
Death walked into Nathan’s field of view immediately, and he found the effect disconcerting; it was as if the skeleton stepped from a space he had always occupied rather than merely appeared. Nathan could bring himself not take the food from the thing’s claws.
“Put it down on the ground.”
Death did so. Nathan sat cross-legged and asked the Knight to continue while he finished his snack. The boy smoothed grass stems beneath his palm.
"Where we are now …" he said, "Is somewhere that can't be reached. A hidden place, like the event horizon.”
The next page snicked smoothly into place.
A fine analogy. Death is one such realm, Nathan.
"We aren't dead though, are we?"
Nathan found himself surprised to be entertaining this possibility only now. He picked the book up.
"I know we can't be in heaven. It's too weird here," he said.
No, we are not dead and this is not Paradise.
The Knight swept his hand across the sky, smearing clouds there. A light rain soon followed and he craned his face upwards. Droplets streamed from his visor's snout. Another page flicked into view.
It follows then that if certain elements of the universe remain unknowable _ exquisitely, immutably so - then why must they concern man? Death need hold no fear for us.
Nathan said that electrons and death were very different. Did the crab's claws relinquish their prize just the briefest moment too quickly?
Immeasurably different yet identical.
"Paradox!" said the boy with a smile.
What a beautiful gift is mortality, life's handmaiden.
"I wish I could live forever," said Nathan defiantly. "I never want to die.”
The Knight looked at Nathan.
Eternal life, the book read.
The boy nodded gravely.
Well then.
A darkness more complete than any Nathan had known fell upon the landscape. Into this sudden abyss came a tiny spume of white light.
The crab's shell excreted a luminous bulb atop a spindly twist of copper cord. Nathan imagined the anglerfish from nature documentaries with its sawtooth grin, shadow-struck by a dangling filament.
Stars flashed now within the firmament; the passage of a billion suns.
"The stars like dust," said Nathan.
The flitting page seemed like a cannon within the black.
Issac Asimov, read the book.
He nodded and read on:
In our imaginations, we can conflate a concept like ‘The lifespan of the universe’ into a human context, our own lives, a year, the blooming of a flower. These are spurious, of course, but yet we persist. Such is our grandeur and our temerity.
Some of these words confounded the boy, but he remained quiet. The gist of what the Knight said was obvious: people could never understand how long the universe would last for, not really.
A galaxy wheeled down upon them, a single star dominating the heavens as might a tyrant moon.
Imagine the passage of billions upon billions of years with yourself as a cogent being. Once the sun has devoured your planet, you will be cast adrift, Nathan, unfettered from not merely from our world itself but from all possible meaning, any context that might make your existence anything less than a persistent madness. You drift in the icy waste, the vacuum between systems, for millennia. In time, the sure hand of gravity is upon you.
The star’s brilliance engul
fed them. Nathan instinctively tightened his eyelids; the light however, was no brighter than a summer’s day. Whether this sun bore down upon them or they flew to it was unclear. There was no sensation of movement - no rushing of wind or displaced air plucking at the boy’s clothes. Looming larger and larger was the gaseous flare of the corona above a roiling sea of yellow-white.
You travel within, as we are now, and are seared for eternal eons.
They entered the star.
How you would agonise for death every second of your damned existence, weep for it even as you endured –
“Unkillable!” yelled Nathan, and smiled at the hyphen.
The page turned.
Unkillable, indeed! Thus I call mortality a gift.
Nathan was about to answer, but instead took in the reddening tunnel about them. He knew that they were almost at the star’s heart. In the space of half a minute the gloom advanced to a pall. The crab’s light blinked on.
A page flipped.
The heavy elements that compose us were made here, carbon and iron and silicon and oxygen. Here you would return as an immortal, gravity sinking you down through the infernal heat and pressure to a billion years of torment.
Nathan thought on this and smiled.
“Okay,” he said. “It would be awful to live forever.”
Yes, said the book simply.
The star dissipated around them, and the pair stood within the wasteland again.
A finite amount of matter was created in the Big Bang. No information can be created or destroyed , added or subtracted from the universe. Matter and energy are finite, fixed quotas. In essence, the First Law of Thermodynamics.
Nathan wondered where this was going, but to the Knight he said nothing.
The second law of thermodynamics: Overall entropy of a system can only increase over time.
Nathan