I was recently lucky enough to find a film that contained a small clip I’d seen on Tiktok about states of matter. In it, a scientist explains that if you put an apple in a box that was completely sealed, what we would observe at first would make sense: eventually the apple would rot and become a humusish material and eventually that material would break down further and further. Leave the apple in the perfect (see-through) box long enough, all of the particles inside of the box, simply obeying the laws of physics as is their wont, so to speak, would then begin cycling through all of the various states the multitude of particles present would be able to cycle through. Probably if it weren’t infinite time (but still a long-ass time), but definitely if it we let the box sit for an infinite amount of time, not only would the apple, at some point, be reconstituted, but eventually any and everything that could be constituted by the particles (and energy, I’m guessing) present, would be— over and over again.
The film, “A Trip To Infinity,” is really wonderful, and features pretty much all of the physicists I’ve read in the last few years, including Carlo Rovelli, author of a bunch of recent physics books for non-physicists (“Helgoland,” about the emergence and implications of quantum theory being the only one I’ve read) and whose lecture on time at “the royal institution” is also both incredible and on youtube. The film considers the concept and reality of “infinity” from a number of angles, and while there were a few things that struck me (the aforementioned apple in a box being the first), one thing in particular has been taking up more space than in the others.
So: one of the physicists, while talking about the end of the universe ‘as we know it,’ when all the energy from all the stars are burned up and expended, mentioned— in passing, which I thought was wild— that the current commonly held belief or strong hypothesis or whatever is that time is probably infinite. And that once all the energy is expended all the inert (?) particles will just sort of float around in darkness or something like this. This is pretty important because for the most part physicists believe that the universe does not “go on” “forever” / is not infinite. There is (probably) x amount of matter in it.
Two pauses:
a) if time and space are inextricable/ basically the same thing (special relativity) then how is time infinite while space isn’t? I might be getting space and matter confused?
b) in order for time to be truly infinite, it had to have no beginning, correct? So there was something before the big bang?
I haven’t really gotten to the big bang yet and try to take my time with this stuff, but I’m starting to (possibly errantly) think of it as the event of the beginning of the universe and not the creation of existence. I think that’s what physicists mean and just have a hard time communicating it? Anyway infinity, moving “downward” in scale, is a paradoxical processes of infinitely halving things forever and ever and so in a sense I suppose that while the event of the big bang has a beginning, that beginning is infinitely “small,” which is harder to wrap my brain around that thinking of something as “infinitely large.”
An “infinite beginning” would be like the way there is no “outside” to a (“bounded”) universe that is not infinite— e.g. the way there is no wall there, but like walking on the earth’s surface if one were to keep going one would “circle back” around to one’s starting point. Still and somewhat relatedly, I’m often confused by scientists mentioning “the first few seconds after” the big bang: if (our experience of) time is an effect of the distribution of mass in space, then wouldn’t time itself be very very different from our current, stretched-out universe, back when it was the size of a basketball? Wouldn’t a few (of “our”) seconds actually be like a million years or something? As an aside there’s a really interesting article at the Pioneer Works website on Stephen Hawking’s last address, I believe, in which he talks about the breaking down of physics at its own limits.
I got off track: popular culture is currently in the midst of a glut of multiversal storytelling: from the Marvel Cinematic Universe to DC, The Spider-verse and Everything Everywhere All At Once, the fantastic possibilities of this sort of storytelling are really, and fittingly, proliferating. In the vast majority of these stories, the set of conditions that make having multiple/ infinite universes possible, is the splitting off of timelines. As the idea goes, and I think this actually goes back to Heisenberg and Schrödinger (and Richard Linklater has an interestingly applicable bit in SLACKER, if I remember right), at the juncture of each possible act in the world the presence of all possible acts do something like somehow occur and split off into their own realities/ timelines. It gets complicated(er) quickly, but that’s the general idea. However, in the above-mentioned documentary the scientists have a lot of fun going off on a tangent about what things would look like if the universe were not only temporarily infinite, but spatially infinitely “large.” What they paint is a picture of a world like our popular stories, but that is “space”-centric, so to speak, and not “time”-centric.
We tend to think, ala the above-mentioned temporal models, of the multiple universes in “the” multiverse as separate and discreet, like an infinite basket of apples. What these scientists reveal is that the power, I guess, of a “single” infinite universe is itself dynamic enough to contain within it the multitude of possibilities expressed in our stories by the different, separate multiverses. If the universe, basically, were “big enough” it would contain within itself an infinite multitude of slightly varying “me’s,” and maybe an infinite amount of me’s exactly like me. Not in another, different, “timeline,” but in this one, just like the apple in the box. What this means is that this, our timeline, is not itself “one,” and is definitely not a “line.”
What’s big about this idea, for me, is not that the multiverse might be real, but that (if it is) it’s this one, the one we live in— that our reality contains within itself the fantasticity that we usually reserve as possible only for other worlds, that it’s okay if we only contain one multitude, and that the world we want can be the one we have.