Wednesday 10 December

Another great day for cloudscapes, even if the temperatures are not all that great: 5C / 41F. No prospects of that getting any higher soon, if anything, there is an advance warning of heavy snow fall in the north and east of the UK on Saturday.

Cathy (Dare to Think) had an interesting entry yesterday on the issue of the space-time continuum. Some 15,000,000,000 years ago, the Big Bang occurred, creating space and time. Echoes of that event still reverberate around the universe, which led Cathy to believe that you could get flashbacks from times past. She imagined that in December 2088, her home would be a park, and anyone passing through the park could come across a ghostly lady sipping cappucino tapping away at a computer keyboard, the way it was in December 2008.

I do not agree with that notion. In my opinion, there is only one constant in the Universe, and that is time. It marches forward at a set pace, which cannot be altered, stopped or reversed. It is the 4th dimension. Anything that has happened in the past cannot be changed, because it would have repercussions on the here and now. I'll give an example from my perspective here in Lewis.

In 1919, a troopship (HMY Iolaire) sank outside the harbour at Stornoway, drowning more than 200. As a result, a young man in one of the villages was forbidden from ever going to sea. He eventually emigrated to Canada, married and had children and grandchildren. Reading about the tragedy, one of the grandchildren contacted me, saying that without the tragedy she would never have been born. Point I'm making is that should someone (be able to) return to 1919 and alter the course of the Iolaire, this would have profound and immediate implications here and now. The lady I'm speaking about would cease to exist, e.g..

As for events leaving an imprint for posterity, well, I'm afraid I do not buy that either. Noise leaves an echo, correct. Events have consequences, and we see those consequences on a daily basis. But, in contradiction to Cathy's theory, atoms and molecules behave in a random fashion (called entropy), and only congregate as a result of random interactions, which, as a result of the laws of physics, lead to events. What went before is lost. A water molecule does not remember that it has fallen out of a cloud of other H2O molecules, into a huge basin of more H2O, imbibed by a bag of bones and flesh called a human being, and passed out again by said human being.

An attempt at philosophy. Feel free to take pot shots.