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Absurdities of scale. The common science, the public version, when it talks about cosmology generally stops at astronomy or launches seamlessly into gibberish.
We go from the "edges of the universe" to string theory and somehow curving "space", and in microscopic terms to quarks and gluons. What I'm exploring here are two things normally called time and space. Astronomical space has the dimensions carpenters are familiar with, height width and depth, and time has what could be called dimensions as well, the linear past present and future, and the totality of that, which we call eternity. Most of us think of eternity as an extension of linear time, a future that keeps on going, or when we turn toward the past a receding end-point that keeps going backward. But there's a way to look at time as all one thing, the totality of time, forward and backward inclusively. You can't do that too easily as long as you need to have a point on a line where your own moment is, where you are, looking at it. But if you imagine yourself stepped back somehow, viewing it from outside, it becomes a thing, and can be examined more precisely. The present is a solid in that the things in it are solid, our perceptions are of solid things, and we know that what this is, where we are, has the solidity of the real. But that moves out from under us, is moving out from under us even while we look at it. So if this moment is solid, why is the past not solid? And if the past is solid - because that's not hard to get to, the past is all those solid moments we've experienced already put together - where is it? What does it inhabit? Where does that moment I began this paragraph now reside? If it's gone, in the sense of disappeared, no longer existing, when did that happen? Was there a transition? What exists at that transition? Is there a threshold? An in-between state? Or is it more likely, and this is my contention, that what we see there is incomplete, and our understanding of the incomplete thing we see is incomplete also. Keep in mind I'm still talking about what we experience, what we know, working outward from the normal and the accepted every-day, the irrefutable reality we have in common, toward what I think is a more accurate, larger view. We move through these days and nights, and to our minds and our perceiving senses our passing confers reality on what we move through. So the past is less real, for all its solidity and changelessness, because it's gone; and the future is like a plan or a dream, an idea, because we haven't gotten there, we haven't seen it yet, so it isn't solid. In that sense we're creating the time we inhabit. Or we seem to be, it feels like it, that's our experience. Our being there makes the future happen, turns it into the present And that's where most of the debate around the concept of free will and pre-determination stalls, because it gets close to the sense that the future must be very like the past, just like it really, except that we're going toward it instead of away from it. And yet we can change things here, move things around, will ourselves to make things different, we have to, it's how we live. It's a problem of definition and viewpoint - the insistence on the one or the other masks the more likely answer that it's both, something bigger, and to our small wondering minds, much stranger than either one. What time is is like what the day is, what life is - the words describe essential things: the day - beginning with the light of dawn, ending with darkness when the sun goes down again, or - beginning at midnight and ending just before midnight 24 hours later. And life - beginning at birth or conception, ending with death or - beginning in some still untraceable early moment when proteins and amino acids formed and held and ending when there's nothing here anymore that meets that definition. Time is what's in front of us and behind us - unrolling in minutes and seconds and hours, and time is also the entirety of all that, eternity with us in it. Because without us, or without something that experienced that flowing forward, eternity would be a singular thing, a ceaseless moment, without temporal change. That's again not a description of the universe as it is but the universe as it is from where we find it - as we live in it, starting from the human position. - Space has, as we saw above, the simple dimensions of volume everyone knows, and those simple dimensions lead us directly to the infinite, which is not as all-encompassing to spatial existence as eternity is to time, unless you expand the definition of the infinite to include all the forms of it. Because obviously you can go in a linear direction any way you choose and just keep going, in an abstract sense. It's nonsense to pretend it stops, or curves or becomes something else that's impassable, just as it's nonsense to pretend that somewhere in the tiny particularities of the sub-atomic everything just stops, at the last place or particle or thing. But somewhere in that reach, outward or inward, we get close to what must be the much vaster thing outside the known; a glimpse or a reflection, the proximity having a scent or a taste, it hints at what must be, infinite infinities, the not only endless reaches of the dimensioned space we inhabit but the infinite reach of that endlessness, a kind of endlessness of endlessnesses. That goes outward as well as inward, forever in all directions. We live right in the middle of all that, neither insignificant nor signifying, and a little thought will show that in some fundamental way anything else that exists does, too. Because there's an infinite thing above and beyond us, and an infinite thing below and beyond us, though neither above nor below catches the position we have in relation to what's really there. Local takes on new meaning in that light. the rumbling comfort of the engine's hum still here - 1:53 AM  
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