Shenzhan 申展
THE LOG is a periodical series about daily encounters giving inspirations for thinking and writing.
“THE LOG” 的中文版本为近处。
Untitled, Oskar Fischinger, 1942
Reading the New York Times Obituary for Stephen Hawking
In “Stephen Hawking Dies at 76; His Minds Roamed the Cosmos”, the New York Times obituary by Dennis Overbye, first published on March 14, 2018, I found one part talking about the quantum principals, one of Hawking’s greatest discoveries, very inspirational philosophically:
“According to quantum principles, the space near a black hole would be teeming with “virtual” particles that would flash into existence in matched particle-and-antiparticle pairs --like electrons and their evil twin opposites, positrons - out of energy borrowed from the hole’s intense gravitational field.
They would then meet and annihilate each other in a flash of energy, repaying the debt for their brief existence. But if one of the pairs fell into the black hole, the other one would be free to wander away and become real. It would appear to be coming from the black hole and taking energy away from it.”
It is generally accepted now that black holes exist and strange things happen near and in them. Hawking, in his Ph.D. thesis, further proves our universe begins with a black hole. So in this logic, if I’m not awfully off track, the reason everything in the universe, including us human beings, that can ultimately be broken down into the smallest quantum particles, exists in the way as we know and experience, is because “the other” falls into the black hole. The energy we feel originally comes from the particles wandering and fleeting the black hole, which the other half of their pairs fall back into.
So in a sense, death is a real return, not only in the philosophical or religious sense ( Hawking himself doesn’t believe in God), but in the sense of physics and cosmology, that the particles reunite with their other half, and in the process annihilate each other, resulting in nothingness.
Perhaps this can help to explain, as the being to think and feel, we humans feel the never-ending quest for “balance”, or “reunion” - as we come from the original cosmos loss.
And I have a feeling that Stephen Hawking would really like Daoism.
Astoria, New York