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I Doubted Everything. One Thing Refused to Leave
I came to this through equations, not incense. Somewhere between Plato and Bohr I hit a wall that our best physics still quietly steps around, and it would not move.
Physics, cosmology and biology as a road to nonduality.
I came to this through equations, not incense. Somewhere between Plato and Bohr I hit a wall that our best physics still quietly steps around, and it would not move.
Press your hand flat on a table. It feels as solid as anything gets. Zoom in and the solidity turns into something else, and then that something else starts to disappear too.
Light from the farthest galaxies has traveled for billions of years to reach your eyes. Relativity says that from the light's side, the trip took no time at all. I couldn't stop asking what that means for the end of everything.
Leave a rock on your desk for a year and it never changes. Cut your finger and something in you starts repairing it within minutes. In 1944 Schrödinger said life feeds on something strange, and the real difference isn't what most people guess.
Look closely at a chair, an electron, an empire. Heraclitus spotted it 2,500 years ago and a 20th-century inventor said it about himself. Once you see it, nothing in the room is sitting still.
Physics can predict a billion atoms to the decimal. Pick one and ask why it decayed at that exact moment, and you hit the edge of everything we know. Einstein refused to accept what's out there.
Everything runs from order to mess, so the beginning must have been impossibly neat. But the early universe looks smooth and bland, just like the end. One force flips the whole picture.
A city-sized rock cleared the stage for us 66 million years ago. Replay history without it and the candidates get strange: a hunter older than trees, a bird that may already be wondering about us, and a shape evolution keeps reinventing.
In 2003 a philosopher made a careful case that we might be living inside a computer. Physics says every bit of computation has a price. Following the bill leads somewhere most simulation debates never go.