Life, the Queer Universe and Ketchup
A recent headline on the BBC website read: “Universe ‘too queer’ to grasp.” Douglas Adams could have told them that some time ago when he wrote:
There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
Richard Dawkins (who wrote The Selfish Gene) suggested at a recent conference held in Oxford that the universe may be just too darn weird for us to ever really understand, that basically we create the universe we perceive by perceiving it in a way we can grasp. For example, he said, we decide that tables and rocks are solid, despite the fact that they are in fact mostly the empty space between atoms. This seems wonderfully similar to the relationship between religion and God: God is inexplicable, essentially too weird to understand but because we need handles on the ungraspable, we frame God in myth, in religion, in ritual to make God something we can narrate. The beautiful interconnectedness of our utter lack of understanding feels like a deep, rejuvinating breath. It makes the small path of daily life feel less dark, and more like a thread in a huge cloth we just can’t see yet.
This also gives me an ironclad excuse for finding the world and my place in it utterly confusing. And now, when Daniel asks what a star would become if it could in fact travel out the other end of a black hole, I can safely say, “Ketchup” and you know, I could be right.
