8 The Direction of Everything
Luca Cangemi has reached the halfway point of his lecture. As he talks, the professor visualises the months and years mapped out in front of him – office hours, book launches, conferences, more Christmases and birthdays since the separation. The irony that time travels in one direction is not lost on a scholar who can’t leave his mistakes in the past. If he were to stand the audience up and switch them around like pieces in a puzzle, would it change the direction of their lives?
“If I asked you to imagine a timeline for the duration of this lecture, where is the start? Over here, yes?” He points to the left of the audience facing him. “But if you came from a Mandarin-speaking culture, you might say up here, above your head. Or if you are from South America, perhaps in front of your eyes.”
For Luca, it’s the other way around. He can see the future arguments about visiting rights, the unspoken distance between his daughter and him growing, Alicia discussing her overachieving father in therapy.
“Whichever linguistic or spatial properties we apply to time, it only flows in one direction. No matter how much we wish to turn it back, we cannot.”
He has seen Angela trying to blend into the middle of her row. All it takes is one momentary lapse in judgement to be ruined in today’s academia. It didn’t seem wrong at the time, but the guilt eats at him. He must speak with her and clear the air.
“The principles of physics do not rely on the forward motion of time, but the constant increase of disorder does. This is entropy.”
Sharing the direction of time is never enough. The dream of proving we can share the experience of time is what drives Luca. He has taught in New York and his native Italy. He has conducted groundbreaking research in The Amazon and is now a professor in London. Sharing in the journey of driven academics like Angela is the reason he still cares about his work.
He steps off stage and seizes a brown paper cup from the front row. “When the coffee gets cold, the heat energy we bought still exists, but in the room, not in the cup. This is a gain in entropy.” The coffee he drinks in the faculty cafeteria tastes bitter and stewed. “When the cup sits here long enough, the water will evaporate. This, too, is a gain in entropy.”
As he climbs back onstage, he recognises the growing disorder in his life. However carefully he plans things, chaos grows.
Luca Cangemi and everyone he knows will be long dead, but the moment will come. Theoretical physicists believe it will be anywhere from 2.8 to 22 billion years in the future. In that moment, everything reverses.
The Big Crunch is a cosmological event in our future and our past in which the density of matter grows sufficiently that gravitational attraction overcomes the expansion that began with the Big Bang. Entropy reverses and the second law is broken. Chaos retreats.
Order is regained as space contracts. Broken rocks reform and decayed bodies reanimate. We live our lives in reverse, unexperiencing everything we did the first time around, moving backwards, shrinking towards birth. Instead of questions about creation, we search for the harbinger of order. Who began this? What is our final form?
Luca imagines the crowds at his book signings dissipating and the offices of his academic fellowships decreasing in size. Wrong turns are righted and his family grows closer. His briefcase heals itself and he returns it to his mother. Life rewinds back to him as a young boy, unreading the words that inspired him to look for meaning in all of this. If it can all be reversed, are all shared experiences undone? All bonds broken? Luca returns into his parents, then ancestors, apes, microbes, and nothing. The earth, the planets and stars all merge into one perfectly ordered mass.
Yet, this is not an end, but another beginning in which the universe is reborn in another bang. Galaxies, planets, plants, and philosophy professors will live the same lives as they did billions of years before (and after). The process of positive and negative entropy repeats and we all make the same mistakes again.
Time elapsed: the infinitely repeating cycle of a universe