The Universe
I would like to recommend an article from George F. Will in today's Washington Post entitled "The Mind That Changed the World".
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The Will article praises Albert Einstein and his work on relativity. George F. Will, a writer with whom I often disagree politically, has taken an enormous concept and elegantly explained its essence in few enough words that people who are not scholars can grasp their meaning and not feel patronized. In this case he provides not only the rudiments of Einstein's discoveries but their implications, consequences and something of their breathtaking beauty. Reading this article has changed my personal conception of the Universe from the one I had retained from childhood. A visualization in which the Universe was a vast nearly empty room dotted with structures--planets, stars, etc--.
I had three questions, none of which were ever answered. First, every room I had ever seen had walls which were the boundaries. Where were those boundaries? Second, every boundary had something beyond it. What was beyond the unfound boundaries?. I could not imagine anything that was uncontained by something else. Like most, I could only reason what I could visualize and I could only visualize shapes and spaces I had experienced in my own life, earthly geometry. Third, everything in my experience had a beginning and an end and a serial history in between, more boundaries. Where was the beginning and where was the end?
There has been input from other readings in the last several years, but after this article, I now see the universe not as a room but an amorphous entity consisting of empty space, incredible densities, bodies moving in infinite patterns acting upon one another with forces only barely observed and understood. The Universe not only includes space and objects and groups of objects, but time itself.
It is all in motion. It is all changing all the time. Space has been shown to bend. Time has been shown to be relative to speed. Perhaps time bends as well. If time and space can bend can they double up on themselves? Are time and space separate entities or are they actually the same thing. The motion and change are not just descriptive facts but part of the substance and texture of the universe. Instinctively, I still want to know if something else contains the amorphous blob, but asking that question may be like refusing to grow up. It may prevent me from conceiving far more exciting questions and reaching for answers. The questions I have posed today will more likely be replaced by more complex ones rather than answered and I suspect that it is in the reaching for answers that gratification will be achieved.
We have heard it said that we humans use only a small fraction of our potential brainpower. One wonders what the fraction was for Einstein. It would seem that to observe, understand and integrate our selves into the real universe we will have to use much more of our intelligence. It may be that the human brain is the only place boundaries actually exist.
Melvyn Polatchek
3:29:32 PM 
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