Farthest Travel: The Real Story
What is the farthest you have ever traveled from home?
Farthest spelled backward is tsehtraf.
The tsehtraf was a backwards look so tsehtraf it becomes and tsehtraf it will always remain.
I guess.
But the words of the philosopher, D.J. Waterman, quoting Pogo come to mind.
“It takes a heap of homing to make a pigeon toed.”
Einstein said that E = mc². There are a bunch of things this equation says and a lot more that it implies. Mainly, though, it says that there is a huge amount of energy trapped in mass and light. There was an instance, we are told, when there was nothing and nothing was everything all trapped in a nothing called a singularity. In due course the singularity achieved its destiny: it became everything. An uncontrolled variable generated by this occurrence was where everything was. At the point of nothing becoming everything, everything was very close to where it had just previously been nothing. Not exactly, but close. But that was a fleeting condition. The energy released by nothing becoming everything brought a new condition into being: speed. Speed drove newly minted everything from wherever it had just not been to where it was about to be, and would continue to about to be for … For what? We call it time. Time came into being as a byproduct of nothing becoming everything.
Preface
Page ii
It was the measure of – something – but it could be described by knowing where everything was then and where everything was now. Then and now were words not known before the singularity had become everything. Then and now are words that let humans sense the thing they call time. Since then, time, once sensed, has been represented with a thing humans call a clock. But you can’t see time with a clock. You can only show a representation of its assumed existence: clicks and clangs. Those are not time; they are just a way of indicating that something we really don’t understand and really can’t describe does in fact exist. And that it is advancing. To some end point. That’s strange. But not as strange as light. Light is a wave. But it is made up of particles. And it’s really, really fast. And that speed is the upper limit of possible speed, we are told. So why is energy equal to a given mass times the speed of light squared?
Speed of light, times speed of light is exponentially faster than the speed of light, isn’t it? So how does that work? It works kinda like the horror that most of human-kind have for the concept of a godless universe. When one admits that the mayhem meted out by human-kind over our tenure on earth has been meted out under the banner “Deus Vult”, or “Gott Mit Uns”, and others in spirit similar to those two, it becomes difficult to say that we need a supreme being to bring out our kinder, gentler selves. Someone needs to test the hypothesis that we might not kill each other if we left the Supreme Being out of our frame of reference and substituted instead the idea that all we need is the will to treat others as we ourselves would choose to be treated. I think someone did that once. It didn’t go well for him. So I guess that’s a moot hypothesis.
And then there is that quantum thing.
Einstein said something like “at the outer edges of my equations things get squirrely” - or something to that effect.
He was talking about the fact that things can be, simultaneously, in more than one place at the same time.
Remember, however, that time is pretty slippery, so that observation, if true, may not mean a whole lot.
These shards of brightly colored glass from the great question jar of the cosmos that has fallen – shattered – to the floor, are the pieces from which I have created the mosaic of the story about to be told.
