If you took an absolutely titanic-sized bag of randomly unsorted letters and numbers and proceeded to draw them out, one by one, laying them in long threads of letters – what is the chance that you would accidentally assemble the collected works of Shakespeare, perhaps Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Orwell’s 1984 or the Tibetan Book of […]
There is a very special sense in which the ordered complexity our world resembles matryoshka nesting dolls. It is not purely of the overt ubiquity of fractal patterns of self-similarity in spatial or material structure and temporal sequence, although these symmetries are striking and quite deeply beautiful in their own mischievously inter-dimensional ways. The recursion […]
Context: Big Bounce Simulations Challenge the Big Bang It makes you wonder how the laws of physics themselves commute the bottleneck from one Universe to another unless they are themselves semi-Platonic forms of logical necessity. Perhaps there is a reductive inevitability in the laws of physics as being the minimally complex form (i.e. as per […]
It is quite difficult to directly perceive at times but everything we do, everything we see and think, all of our behaviours and beliefs or patterns of reflex and unscripted living joy (or sorrow) – it is all just a flowing form and effervescing pattern of self-replication. What is really clever about it all, and […]
We (all) often forget that every single thing any of us does is so stupendously unlikely in such a vast and ultimately meaningless Cosmos that every act, every thought and every artefact or consequence is of monumental significance. We corral these wonders into the small, everyday concepts and containers of art and objects we can […]
So, here’s the thing: most people don’t want to wonder about the deep mysteries of existence – not because it takes a lot of effort to disassemble the reality we perceive of as ourselves, as others and the world. Quite the opposite – most of us try to avoid questioning the truth of the reality […]
“What is the meaning of life? That was all – a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.” – Virginia Woolf […]
In what ways might melancholy and a gradual (or rapid, accelerating) slide into sadness or feelings of hopelessness be the natural heir of organic experience in a material world that is always and already dissonant with energy diffusion and the endemic thermodynamic burden of what amounts to irremediable emotional and corporeal loss and decay? All […]
Somewhere in the deep dark pit of indeterminate catastrophe that we call our shared Global history, we find ourselves endlessly seeking reasons, causes and inviolable proofs to explain just why our world is the way it is. Our linear, narrative minds are so entrained and reflexively conditioned by these visceral, intimate experiences of time and […]
…and these, all of these bodies, these artefacts and inscriptions that were once dust will once again be dust. These that were once lonely atoms drifting in all of cosmic space and time will once again be set free to wander. Many, many trillions of years from now even atoms will devolve into a slowly-dissasembling […]
More cosmological enigmas are upon us. The statement that “disparate observed properties of the Universe appear to be mutually inconsistent” is awesome. It is endlessly entertaining that we are all so constantly surprised to discover that these discontinuities and (apparent) logical enigmas arise. When they do emerge as artefacts of observation, it suggests that radical […]
The utter vacuum and meaningless emptiness at the very heart of our existence is disconcerting, dissonant and it is in general the last thing that anyone wants to hear about or acknowledge. From those brief few years we may each be lucky enough to experience, we seek and weave what little meaning and purpose we […]
