I can state with conviction that I don't know much about time, and since they are both intimately related, I must admit I don't know much about space either. I've never felt the need to know, and no one has thought them important enough to take me aside and explain them to me.
I don't know much about life either and whether or not it's connected to one or both of the above. I don't know how life began or how it will end. To be brutally frank, I don't think anyone else knows much more about it than I do. I can tell you this much with confidence: space is big, time is long, and life is exceedingly short. We're all going to spend much more time dead than alive, that's for sure, and regardless of the care you lavish on the state of your health, you're going to be dead just as long as I am.
The heaviest thin book I ever read was Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time. Believe me -- he is as lost as you and I. Oh, I learned a few things. For instance: A black hole is really a brilliant white, That's because just before matter is sucked into it, it reaches the speed of light and converts itself to energy. What we see is matter waving goodbye to us as it goes down one of the great cesspools in the sky. Then there's this business of an expanding and contracting universe, you know, like a balloon you blow up and then let the air go out of again. Professor Hawking says if the universe has enough matter in it, it could contract to a single blob and maybe the whole business would start over with "Big Bang II". Just think of that! The Battle of Hastings, Moses parting the Red Sea, and Barbra Streisand singing "People" -- all over again.
Should that happen, the Professor alerts us to the premise that as we contract, time could possibly run backward. This is unsettling. You and I would cringe to think of its effect on the insurance community and OTB, but Dr. Hawking is quick to pacify us by admitting that such a situation is improbable in scientific terms. So for better or worse, we may go backward, but time will plod along just the way it always has.
Stephen Hawking is obsessed, as all physicists have been at one time or another, with the "Unified Field Theory". Why can't you make things at the atomic level behave like things at the cosmic level? Well, as I said before, that's because he doesn't know any more about time and space than I do. Don't look to me, Professor, I've got my own problems.
My problem is life. I have a pretty good idea of what life is, but I can't tell you why it is. My dog Patsy and I walk the green belt at Northern State Parkway; we check out life along the way. In late summer you'd swear life had given up the green belt as a waste of time, and next spring there would be nothing but soggy six-pack containers and plastic hamburger boxes in bloom. But when we get home, I have to take Patsy out back and comb the burrs and seed cases out of his fur. Life, dead as it appears to be, has developed hooks and serrations to catch in the fur of animals and the cuffs of trouser legs. By doing so, it seems to know Patsy and I will take next year's life with us and plant it in more fertile soil.
That's the 'what' of it, and from the 'what' of it we can extrapolate the 'how' of it. But what puzzles me, and Patsy too, is the 'why' of it. In this brave new century just around the corner I am sure science will find all the answers to what life is. When the last gene falls into place, it will have the how of it also, but not the 'why'.
If dead grasses and weeds have faith in Patsy and me, if they place their dried husks and seeds in our care to live again, there is something to be learned from that. Life does not end with dying.
I can live with that.
Copyright 1998