The Age of Spiritual Machines
Chapter One
The Law Of Time And Chaos
A (Very Brief) History of the Universe:
Time Slowing Down
The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.
-- Muriel Rukeyser
Is the universe a great mechanism, a great computation, a great symmetry, a
great accident or a great thought?
-- John D. Barrow
As we start at the beginning, we will notice an unusual attribute of the nature
of time, one that is critical to our passage to the twenty-first century. Our
story begins perhaps 15 billion years ago. No conscious life existed to
appreciate the birth of our Universe at the time, but we appreciate it now, so
retroactively it did happen. (In retrospect -- from one perspective of quantum
mechanics -- we could say that any Universe that fails to evolve conscious life
to apprehend its existence never existed in the first place.)
It was not until 10-43 seconds (a tenth of a millionth of a trillionth of a
trillionth of a trillionth of a second) after the birth of the Universe that the
situation had cooled off sufficiently (to 100 million trillion trillion degr ... read full excerpt from: The Age of Spiritual Machines ebook
