Bring on Those Last Three Minutes

I’m nearly finished with Paul Davies’ examination of the possible ends for this cosmos we call home. He split the possible outcomes into those pertaining to an ever-expanding universe and those for one where gravity gets the better of it all and we end up with a big crunch. I think I once suggested that visions of heaven could fill up the split seconds before death giving an illusion of eternity and this is very similar to a situation discussed in this book. There is a possibility that even in the finite seconds left to any intelligent entity, the oscillations that result will allow this entity to have an infinite number of brain states therefore allowing it to ‘imagine’ a correspondingly infinite number of things, to be able to create whole virtual worlds that last for a subjective eternity. Sounds weird but gives hope to the nihilists. My old friend Bertrand Russell, crops up several times as the epitome of atheism, with his nihilism being the result of the knowledge that the universe would end. I think my response, even allowing for my uninformed support for the new cosmologists, would be for Mr Russell to get some perspective – the universe has some years left to go either way. He is of course dead now which sort of proves his point regarding pessimism and the future, and therefore had no knowledge of the possible extra ends to the universe, chilling and instant transformations of matter through flips in the semi-stable state of all matter which mean we all vapourise along with everything else in an instant with NO warning. But then again, we will never know about that so why worry. I could be an hour away from such an event – a second – a lifetime – an evolutionary timescale. The fact that this paragraph is complete means that …….


Sorry! Just joking there!

I got this at the weekend, not that I’ve been able to watch it yet as the small boy is at the stage where he will repeat anything. Along with his sister, he has been enjoying the “Cracking Contraptions” extras on the Curse of the Were-Rabbit DVD. His particular favourite is the Autochef, maybe because the device in question looks a bit like a Dalek, and he has found a catchphrase in the poor robot’s pre-demise expletive of “knickers”. He follows this up with an approximation of the resulting explosion in the form of a raspberry and a huge smile. Unfortunately his sister has also taken this on board but can quote the rest of the sketch as well including “More tea vicar?” (which she says as “Naughty Vicar”) and the very dodgy line of “Something for the weekend Sir?” My plan to have all the kids doing “Clap, Clap, Grabowski” in the playground has not worked but I worry that we will be called into school because of the chant of “Something for the weekend Sir?” We have tried to explain why this is not polite phrase but she keeps forgetting. Maybe a useful entry point into the inevitable “health education” talk which will be on us anytime now. Never had that embarrassment in my life – my mother was a doctor – and I suspect that my year 5 project on the human body resulted in a sudden bringing forward of the relevant lessons at my school. That Desmond Morris has a lot to answer for though I suspect that I was not the only one in the class to have a working knowledge of the subject due to the knowing and ironic reply to the Question posed at the start of the dodgy seventies cartoon we were shown. “Where do babies come from?” was met with a shout of “Mars!” from the back row.