Cosmic Musings - Irrational Bullshit

 This is the preface of a book I just finished writing.

I won't waste any money on self-publishing this one.

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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 a time, 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 be for …

For what?

We call it time.

Time came into being as a byproduct of nothing becoming everything.

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 a thing called time.

Since, once sensed, humans figured out how to represent it with a thing called a clock.

But you can’t see time with a clock.

You can only show the effects of its 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.

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 speed.

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.

So how does that work?

Kinda like the horror that most of human-kind have for the concept of a godless universe.

When one admits the mayhem meted out by humankind over our tenure on earth under the banner “Deus Vult”,or “Gott Mit Uns” it becomes hard to say that we need a supreme being to bring out our kinder, gentler selves.

All we need is the will to treat others as we would be treated.

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 I just dropped on the concrete and cosmic floor of conjecture are the pieces from which I have created the mosaic of the story about to be told. 

 Cinq is one of the main characters in the story.