Zero Hero

Fresh off of watching the two part documentary "Everything and Nothing" from Dr. Al-Khalili in Astronomy class and I am thinking about the nature of reality.  That unsettling feeling that some profound insight is lurking in my mind that is too big to be held inside my head bothers me in a self indulgent way.

Carlo Rovelli's book on Reality resurfaces in my mind tinged with my partial understanding of Alan Guth's seminal work on inflationary theory.  Sean Carroll's The Big Picture is a huge contributor as well to the nebulous thought that some kind of epiphany is lurking, not quite ready to emerge from my subconscious.



Al-Khalili reminded me that there is no nothingness - the vacuum is teaming with virtual particles.  Guth calls the Universe the "ultimate free lunch" as it inflates from a quantum fluctuation.  Rovelli showed me that it is the fields that bring about reality not the other way around.  These ideas are swirling around in my head like Sean Carroll's argument about complexity: now is the only epoch in the evolution of the Universe that is interesting (like the cream not yet stirred completely into the coffee).  In the past, it was all energy with no structure; in the future it will be all structure with no energy.  Only now do we have both.

All of the conserved quantities (charge, energy, momentum, etc.) add up to zero in this vast Universe so far as we can tell.  But what a glorious zero it is!

2 + (-2) 

has quantities within and operations between and implied relationships beyond and I could build a more complicated and even more exciting zero by squaring and square rooting the expression.  Take this mathematical game out as far as it will go and we might even build a Universe of our own!

I too am undeniably a zero.  Pretty insignificant in the scheme of things for sure and yet, also undeniably, the most important thing in my own life is my own consciousness.  Without my own perspective, there is no me to love the others around me, to hold these crazy thoughts in my head and to share them out to the two or three people who will eventually read this far into my post.  I can wallow in my inconsequence or, in my relations with others, I can create a reality of sorts around me. I can choose to be the hero of my own narrative and add up to zero in an interesting way.