“Have you ever stood and stared at it, marvelled at its beauty, its genius? Billions of people just living out their lives, oblivious.”
Agent Smith, Circa 1999
I like to stare at the bathtub water as it exits down the drain hole.
For some reason I cannot help but find it fascinating. I also like to make my children watch it also, but they tend to run screaming when the eventual loud monster sucking noise happens, but I digress.
Surely it is no coincidence that the soap bubbles swirling around the drain hole resemble that of a spiral galaxy.
Every image or animation of a black hole that I have ever seen resembles my bath water disappearing down its own black hole. The bubbles on the outer rim swirl slowly in their blobby clumps, picking up speed as they approach the centre, stretching out until they are no longer discernable as discreet bubbles. The steam shooting upwards from the whole even resembles the more recent depictions of black holes expelling large jets of gas.
How do I know I am not witnessing the demise of a galaxy every time I pull the plug?
And should I feel guilty about it? Maybe. Though I shall park those hand-of-god delusions for now.
I have often, as many have before, toyed with the idea that everything on the large scale, is just a fractal-like representation of everything on the smaller scale.
But maybe there is more to it than that.
Maybe everything on the small scale is the same thing on the large scale. They are somehow intrinsically linked, just somehow on a different time scale.
That is, if you zoom down far enough from the galactic scale down through the quantum scale, you will end up back at galactic scale.
I see universes popping in and out of existence as quickly as bubbles in the bath tub. But if you just so happened to be in one of those universes (as we may well be), the popping of our own galactic bubble would take billions of years. So there’s no need to panic.
I did have a dream about this once, and it all made sense at the time.
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