Has our star left the show?
Imagine sitting out on your balcony one evening, enjoying a nice glass of wine, watching colors spill across the sky as the sun goes down. What if eight minutes before the sun is lost to the horizon, it suddenly vanished, disappearing from the universe entirely? Well, it wouldn’t make too much of a difference to your last sunset (ignoring the gravitational effects), because the light emitted by the sun would still be on its way to you and your chilled glass of wine. A more practical example would be that some of the stars in the night sky could potentially not exist anymore, yet their light still reaches our eyes. Now what if we take this example and apply it to the Universe itself. Could it be that the cause of the big bang or the source that got our universe going, is now gone?
Just like we can study stars that vanished long ago because they are light years away, maybe we can exist even though the universe is no longer ‘here’. Therefore although paradoxical in thought, it could be that the universe we live in, is already over. Or at least, the main event is over, and we’re sort of the afterparty I guess. Spacetime and matter being simply what the universe emits and not the universe itself. In this scenario, our role is that of a biologist collecting samples left behind in a forest by some unknown animal. We see its footprints and we find its fur, but never the animal itself. Of course, it’s a little more complex in our case since we’d be the traces studying the traces in order to calculate and imagine the origin of the traces.
Ultimately, it’s not so consequential to us whether this is the case or not and it’s certainly not something that might be scientifically possible to verify. Nevertheless, it seems interesting to explore the idea and therefore one would wonder why this could be the case. One that strikes me most is our inability to have any real impact on the universe. We are forced to perceive a moment of time and we have no ability to change that limit and no ability to manipulate time outside of our perception. The same goes for matter and space. We can move matter around but we can’t create it or destroy it. We can move through space but we can’t do anything to stop it from being added to the universe or take away space. Maybe our relationship to the universe is like that of a car and the sound it emits. The car can stop or start and go wherever it likes, producing more and more sound, but the sound of the car once emitted will be a fixed amount.
In other words we might be a byproduct of the universe, not the universe itself. If our beast has truly vanished and we’re the tracks left with only the tracks, could this mean that no matter how much we understand of our universe, the final truth of reality is unattainable? Or on the other hand, is it possible to see into the true nature of the universe? Personally, I don’t believe the latter is the case, but I also don’t believe this means that all pursuit of knowledge is futile and we should throw in the towel. We should still with the tools of reason and the evidence that comes to us through science always strive to improve our reconstruction of what the universe might be. Nevertheless, it’s important to remain humble, for we might be studying the painting and not the scenery itself.
What do you think, is it possible for humans to understand the ultimate reality of the universe?
