It happens during car crashes and during collisions in sports: The brain alters its perception of time. Life becomes a slow motion movie. Certainly, the opposite also occurs when we watch a pot of water come to a boil. Skip the latter dilation of time, and concentrate only on the slowing—and stopping. A camera catches a water drop hitting a puddle. Concentric waves freeze in crests and troughs. We assume that they are, in fact, not frozen because everything we experience in the macro universe changes, some things changing more slowly than others, but all ineluctably moving and changing.
Our ancient ancestors could freeze time in statues and paintings. We can do it with smart phones. With little artistic skill, anyone can stop the planet, preserve an instant in a place, and keep, for whatever it’s worth, entropy at apparent bay.
Imagine a camera perched on a tripod outside the universe. It stops the expansion and puts the entire universe in a single place at a single time. That’s what from the inside of the universe the COBE satellite did. It took a “picture” of the early universe. Not the most sophisticated of sensors, the COBE satellite’s image was surpassed in resolution (detail) by the WMAP platform* and then by the Planck Surveyor launched by the European Space Agency. So, now we have a nicely detailed image of the universe when it was just an infant, about 370,000 years old.**
You are in that picture. No, not the current “you” in your process of realizing your potential, but the seminal you, your constituent subatomic and atomic makeup and the energy that drives it toward that realization of potential. Were it possible to get a snapshot of an earlier moment—it’s not—you could see unity not only in your forming constituents but also in everyone else’s, a family picture for which the photographer doesn’t have to say, “Okay, everyone move closer together.” In that early photo everyone is already close, so close as to be united, or, rather unified. Everything and everyone unified just before the Big Bang, though there would have been, in the absence of time, no “before.” Unity everywhere—and nowhere.
Those frozen moments we preserve with smart phones, ancient sculptures, and paintings, are our way of capturing the ostensible unity of place’s constituents. The image of the Echo of the Big Bang, the Cosmic Microwave Background, gets close to freezing that moment when all of us were unified. Since that moment, however, everything has been in the process of forming temporary unities in an unstoppable expansion toward dis-unification. Every picture you take, though subject to its own disintegration, is a unification in stillness. Every image, every statue, every painting serves as a reminder that everything and all of us were once unified.
*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_microwave_background#/media/File:Ilc_9yr_moll4096.png
**https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_microwave_background#/media/File:PIA16874-CobeWmapPlanckComparison-20130321.jpg
Our ancient ancestors could freeze time in statues and paintings. We can do it with smart phones. With little artistic skill, anyone can stop the planet, preserve an instant in a place, and keep, for whatever it’s worth, entropy at apparent bay.
Imagine a camera perched on a tripod outside the universe. It stops the expansion and puts the entire universe in a single place at a single time. That’s what from the inside of the universe the COBE satellite did. It took a “picture” of the early universe. Not the most sophisticated of sensors, the COBE satellite’s image was surpassed in resolution (detail) by the WMAP platform* and then by the Planck Surveyor launched by the European Space Agency. So, now we have a nicely detailed image of the universe when it was just an infant, about 370,000 years old.**
You are in that picture. No, not the current “you” in your process of realizing your potential, but the seminal you, your constituent subatomic and atomic makeup and the energy that drives it toward that realization of potential. Were it possible to get a snapshot of an earlier moment—it’s not—you could see unity not only in your forming constituents but also in everyone else’s, a family picture for which the photographer doesn’t have to say, “Okay, everyone move closer together.” In that early photo everyone is already close, so close as to be united, or, rather unified. Everything and everyone unified just before the Big Bang, though there would have been, in the absence of time, no “before.” Unity everywhere—and nowhere.
Those frozen moments we preserve with smart phones, ancient sculptures, and paintings, are our way of capturing the ostensible unity of place’s constituents. The image of the Echo of the Big Bang, the Cosmic Microwave Background, gets close to freezing that moment when all of us were unified. Since that moment, however, everything has been in the process of forming temporary unities in an unstoppable expansion toward dis-unification. Every picture you take, though subject to its own disintegration, is a unification in stillness. Every image, every statue, every painting serves as a reminder that everything and all of us were once unified.
*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_microwave_background#/media/File:Ilc_9yr_moll4096.png
**https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_microwave_background#/media/File:PIA16874-CobeWmapPlanckComparison-20130321.jpg
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