Sunday, June 7, 2009

From the singularity to now

I spent the last week in a rained in beach condo wanting to snorkel. What amazed me is that this particular week, there was heavy rain in South Florida, which just happened to be the week of my vacation. Then today, a day after I got home, the weather started improving. I know the two are unrelated, or are they? Some theorists have put forward that every event in the universe is related to every other event. This dates all the way back to the time when the universe was a singularity, to the point of the rapid expansion from that singularity to the universe of billions of galaxies and trillions of stars. As all elementary particles once shared a space many times smaller than the head of a pin, they interacted, and the after effects of their interactions have lingered even when they traveled through the eons and many light years of space. As a result, events separated by immense distances could be connected. In effect, the behavior of every particle in the universe may have been influenced by every other particle. So a lightning bolt on a planet 20,000 light years away could be somehow connected to the Kentucky derby. Do the interactions of particles billions of years ago now result in my vacation being rained out? Maybe. Just something to ponder.

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