Home > Work > Probable Impossibilities: Musings on Beginnings and Endings
1 " the birth of our universe was a one-performance event, and we weren’t there in the audience. "
― Alan Lightman , Probable Impossibilities: Musings on Beginnings and Endings
2 " Now it is well known in the science of order and disorder that, other things being equal, larger spaces allow for more disorder, essentially because there are more places to scatter things. Equivalently, smaller spaces have more order. As a consequence, in the Carroll-Guth picture, the order of the universe was at a maximum at the Big Bang, with order decreasing both before and after. Recall that the forward direction of time is the movement of order to disorder. Thus the future points away from the Big Bang in both directions of time. A person living in the contracting phase of the universe sees the Big Bang in her past, just as we do. When she dies, the universe is larger than when she was born, just as it will be for us. "
3 " My granddaughter asked me how far away the Sun is. That question I couldn’t answer with apples and oranges. But if you traveled to the Sun on a high-speed train, say at two hundred miles per hour, it would take about fifty years. She nodded. To get to the nearest star beyond the Sun on the same train would take about fifteen million years. "
4 " energy "
