Jul 08 2009
Transient Life
On Monday my wife and I were in Boston. On Tuesday night — in Montreal, where we are now. On the drive north we took a scenic route, stopping to stretch our legs by a small, ancient-looking cemetery tucked into the woods. Many of the tombstones were too weathered to read. This epitaph caught my eye and lodged itself into memory:
Death is a debt to nature due, which I have paid and so must you.
Blunt but profound. It brought to mind an element of the quantum world: virtual particles. These fleeting bits of matter appear out of a void. In a sense, they violate the conservation of matter and energy. But they do so for only a fraction of a tiny fraction of a second. I recall physicists referring to virtual particles as existing on a loan of energy. The more they borrow (the larger the loan of energy), the more quickly they must repay the loan.
As the universe expands, increasing entropy is the overall rule. A growing disorganization. And yet there are pockets, or perhaps packets, of life. Negentropy, negative entropy, an organization of atoms. Is this also akin to a loan that must eventually be repaid? Is all of life, in a sense, only virtually real, vs. an absolute existence?
