Me, Space-Time, and Cycles

         "There is no such thing as an empty space...Space-Time does not claim existence on its own, but only as a structural quality of the [gravitational] field."  - Albert Einstein, 1952 

This idea of Space & Time not really meaning anything outside of the context of gravity is something I've been trying to wrap my mind around ever since I started teaching astronomy: The ever expanding universe creating space-time as the masses separate and the meaningless of space-time outside of or before the universe ( as opposed to the Newtonian view that the stage already set and the universe plays out on that pre-existing stage).  

Before the discovery of Dark Energy (our short hand for the acceleration of the expansion of the Universe), most scientists thought the universe would end in a Big Crunch.  The story was that gravity would eventually win over the expansion and bring everything crashing together again... and maybe we could return to the Big Bang.  Such a cool idea since this eliminates the awkwardness of a one-and-done Universe with a questionable beginning and final end.

However, with Dark Energy, it appears we are doomed to the Big Chill and we will be forever haunted with the strange uniqueness of our finite-in-time Universe.

Or are we?

I recently came across this idea of Roger Penrose  (Conformal Cyclic Cosmology) that, when the Universe ends in its ultimately highest entropy state with either no mass or mass evenly distributed, Space-Time will once again be meaningless.  Highest entropy begins to look like lowest entropy and, voila, we have recovered the initial conditions of our Universe... so another Big Bang can occur.

Reversing the concept of what Space and Time are is a really powerful frame shift, is it not?  Instead of mass moving around in space and time, mass is the creator of space and time.  Once there is no interesting movement of mass, there are not relationships to have and Space and Time just fade away as meaningful concepts.

Kind of like how Who-I-Am is somehow encoding in the details of the relationships between all these atoms in my body.  It's not actually the atoms themselves, but the interesting relationships between them.  Lay out all my carbons, hydrogens, oxygens, and nitrogens in a regular array and I guarantee you that guy will not be anything like me.  Long after I'm gone though, the elements in my body can be re-used in some future self-aware sentient creature.  

"There is no such as an eternal Ken Rideout, Ken Rideout does not exist on his own.  He is an emergent property of the C H O N atoms in his body."