Cosmic Foam

Once again, it's time to unreel a few words on the state of the universe, the world, and just what Catwoman is getting up to in this latest episode of 'Batman'. What is this scheme that involves university and burning up Batman and Robin in a giant percolator? What? Oh, never mind, it's a purely tangential concern, and nowhere near as important as the ongoing narrative in Connie Willis's novel 'To Say Nothing Of The Dog'. Oh, is that tangential again? Really? What isn't tangential, then?

It's curious to think that we're living in a universe which may not have anything outside it. After all, if the universe is defined as 'everything' then how can there be anything to be outside? Is the defintion wrong? Is it possible that it's really one universe amongst many, a bubble of reality living in a extra-cosmic foam of similar and dissimilar bubbles? Wouldn't that be amazing, and utterly confusing? What about alternative timelines, if they even exist? Would time travel change history inside a bubble, or shift us into another one? Or would it completely rewrite the whole foam?

It's nice to think about the larger things from time to time, the grander unanswerable questions. Are we just assemblages of randomly firing neurons, or are there souls flying around in the cosmos, flitting here and there from person to person, from death to life to death to life? What could possibly be facilitating such things? A reincarnational travel agent? Wouldn't that be ridiculous and fascinating?

Ah well, back to sleep, that grand healer of all ills, and releaser of the imagination. Or is it time to go and unwittingly tour the cosmos again?

O.