Cosmic Dust

Another busy day awaits—oncological blood-letting, Fall seasonal maintenance of the fireplace and propane heating system, and a long-delayed haircut. Tomorrow will bring still more attention to my healthcare and to periodic household upkeep and maintenance. To start this day off with suitable fanfare, and after I properly introduce myself to an otherwise unpredictable day, I’ll shower and shave and wander aimlessly into the abyss. Subsequent to my cleansing, and depending entirely on my state of mind afterward, I will stumble into a day unlike any I have experienced heretofore. I refuse to make predictions about this as-yet-unencountered day. Ahhh..it’s not so much a refusal as an inability…similar to one of the reasons I avoid knife-fights. Predictions often lead to blood stains on pristine white shirts.

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I do not cling to even a shred of hope that I will one day understand quantum theory. Quantum theory is at odds with “truth” and “understanding” and “observation” as I believe them to be. Those conflicts exist, no matter what definition I might apply to quantum theory and its applications in quantum mechanics. People who are comfortable with the discomfort of knowing that observing a behavior changes it live in a dimension far outside of the one(s) in which I live. In other words, an observation of relative distance (“far,” for example) is possible only in a dimension in which Schrödinger’s cat is both dead and alive at any given moment, yet simultaneously neither at the same time. Some people think the concepts around quantum theory and Schrödinger’s cat are simple in the extreme. Other people are certain those concepts represent the ultimate in complexity. Yet those same groups of people neither accept nor deny the legitimacy of those theories, opting instead to embrace both through repudiation and confirmation. Nothing is “known” at this moment in time; everything is “doubted,” “questioned,” and/or “probably unlikely” with an extreme level of certainty in denial.

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A nuclear fence surrounds the observable universe, making observation beyond that fence impossible. The term, nuclear fence, is arbitrary and nonsensical, but probably is the closest we can come to describing—using the English language—such a barrier. Regardless of what is it or what we call it, that barrier to understanding was conceived and a prototype designed and built by supernatural vagabonds who troll failed galaxies and feed on the remnants of stars…event horizons encircling black holes.  Carl Sagan was the only human who ever saw beyond our own nuclear fence. What he saw was incomprehensible in size and beauty; more than 990 trillion universes, each one at least 100 trillion times the size of our own universe. The least intelligent beings who live within some of those 990 trillion universes possess intelligence that far exceeds the brilliance of Carl Sagan. In fact, those dim-witted sentient mistakes labeled Carl a “knuckle-dragging product of interspecies  incestuous bad-behavior derived from intellectual cesspools.”

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On the other end of the spectrum is a pocket where purity, decency, and love reside. Carl spent most of his time on Earth there, surrounded by like-minded people. That distant point on the spectrum is visible today only as a dim, pulsating speck of light. Perhaps it will grow brighter one day. Or it will be extinguished under a cloud of deadly cosmic dust.