I just finished my latest trashy romance, the third in a trilogy and it was so good it left me yearning for true love. Irritated, I paced around the apartment and grumbled about how much I hate everything. Then, as luck would have it, I stumbled across a book that I have with me purely by accident; a book I loaned to a friend two years ago and he happened to remember to give it back to me, Stephen Hawking's The Theory of Everything. Here, I thought, was the perfect solution to stupid trashy romances and their manipulating you into wanting true love.

As I was reading just the very beginning of it I began to remember how much I love Stephen Hawking and, furthermore, how much fun it is to contemplate the mysteries of the universe. More than that, though, I thought back on my childhood and how much easier it was to accept certain ideas, like infinity. When I was a wee little girl someone, probably my dad, told me that the universe was everything. It was simple and it made sense. I thought to myself, okay--I can accept that. Then, probably around high school, maybe earlier, it was brought up that the universe was expanding. This here was a problem. If the universe was everything it couldn't expand, seeing how it was, well, everything. And so my tumultuous relationship with infinity, space, and time began.

I tried to read A Brief History of Time in high school and that didn't work out so well, but a while after graduating college I got through it and, more than that, enjoyed it. I'm a bit of an armchair theoretical physicist--I hate the math and refuse to learn how to do it myself, but I love the theories and thinking about them. This is what happens when English majors read Hawking and Greene. I started to read about black holes and found them incredibly exciting when suddenly I realized I had hit upon a snag; I have an irrational fear of falling into a black hole. As irrational fears go I think that's a pretty good one.

So now, my contemplations of the universe are hampered by a couple of things: 1) irrational fear of falling into a black hole 2) inability to fully comprehend the size of the universe since it isn't infinity 3) annoyance with the relationship between space, time, and gravity.

I bring all this up as a background to remark on the humor of my young mind's willingness to accept and even, to some degree, understand infinity. When the universe was everything I never thought twice about it--it was everything. But when the universe stopped being everything and just became really, really big well, that was another matter entirely. And I think that's something. I suppose there are many examples of a child's mind willing to accept concepts adults have trouble with from religion to physics, but reading this particular book right now sparked my particular memory and made me want to muse about it.

There is certainly the point that children see things more simply and so conceive of a concept in terms small enough to understand; adults try to grasp all the ins and outs as it were. But thinking on human nature and our self-centeredness, I wonder if part of it isn't also an adult's need to feel like s/he matters. Descartes said, "I think, therefore, I am" and whole philosophies have worked to deal with that. What's more, when you start to conceive the universe as really, really big and, more importantly, finite, you begin to realize how little you matter in the grand scheme of things. I matter to me, obviously, and we all matter to each other (people that know each other I mean) but long after we're dead the universe keeps on kicking until one day it stops regardless of our continued existence or not. That's a pretty crazy concept to contemplate.

I should also point out that I've been in houses with cable the last few days and so have watched The History Channel and The Discovery Channel; there was a very nice program on the evolution of the Earth yesterday.

Anyway, I know physicists are still fighting over the existence of a "theory of everything" but it occurs to me that the universe functions just fine in conjunction with itself. That says to me that there has to be a theory of everything, we just may not be able to comprehend it yet. I mean, how can there not be? But, on the flip side, there isn't necessarily a theory that can be applied to every human being because we're such capricious characters and then, if there isn't a theory of everything for the universe doesn't that raise an interesting question about the nature of its existence? Not necessarily talking sentience here, but perhaps a little chaos theory.

I have no greater point with all of this, but musing over my irrational fear of falling into a black hole and suffering a horrible, painful death stretched out over infinity served its purpose marvelously in no longer wishing I had true love. See? Science really does solve everything.