Only a physicist

This response, in a New Scientist interview a few weeks ago with physicist Brian Green, to Is there any question that keeps you up at night? comes as such elegant relief to the usual background blather of comments and opinions that it has stayed with me. There’s no talk of mortgages, commodities, price indexes, the correct way to do this or that, creative fixations or human idiocy, no hint of what everyone should think, wear, understand and do, but a clear, crisp focus on the fundamentals of existence:

I wish it was just one. There are two that, if I allow myself to think about them, make my heart sink. Why is there something rather than nothing? It’s a simple question that’s been asked for so long and the idea of nothing seems logically sensible. But when I truly imagine nothingness, well, I find it almost scary. Why isn’t there nothing?

The other question is the nature of time. Time is with us, every moment. I can’t even say a sentence without invoking a temporal word – moment. But what is time? When we look at the mathematics of our current understanding of physics, time is there, but there’s no deep explanation of what it is or where it came from.

So: nothingness and time. The mind of a physicist is indeed a beautiful thing.

Viewing the world through my own tiny, cracked prism, what woke me up last night was a writerly nightmare of the type I don't usually have. In it, I had just written a spectacularly brilliant piece on Rover, I was walking through the park holding my notebook triumphantly aloft and feeling euphoric about my accomplishment when a flash flood tore across Albert Park and ripped the notebook from my grasp. I floundered though the water, recovered Rover just as it was about to go down a drain, but alas, its circuitry was sodden and the Great Work was gone. The final, dramatic scene had me standing limp and lost as the light darkened around me, staring despairingly at the useless little computer in my hands.

Talk about self obsessed.