A Theory Of Life and Death- Living Systems Trilogy Part 1
I am obviously not a scientist, but physics has fascinated me since the movie What the Bleep Do We Know. Since then, I have been avidly following the microcosm of the quantum process, as well as it’s macrocosm cosmological opposite.
It seems to me that the further they go on their search for the smallest “God Particle”, the more they find themselves faced with the infinity of the large. The other day I was reading an article on the Australian Broadcasting app about the Large Hadron Collider in Cern. As I read, I had another of these realisations that seem to be coming fast and furiously these days, providing me with material to share with you. The original article by Carl Smith can be read here if you are interested. https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2023-02-19/antimatter-factory-physics-most-expensive-explosive-substance/101948092
The gist of the matter is, it seems, that at the time of the Big Bang, there were equal amounts of particles of matter as there were what is called antimatter. In life everything has an opposite: night and day, hot and cold, summer and winter, negative and positive charges The thing is that when matter meets antimatter (its material mate) they annihilate each other. This is no reflection on the tendency for humans who get together with people that are their opposite number, battling their way through life. Or does it?
The question is ‘where has all the antimatter gone’ because all we see in life is matter. Along with that, why the hell is the Universe still in existence at all? Why wasn’t it wiped out immediately? So, on our physicists go at Cern, trying to answer this question by bombarding protons with iridium at great expense to a starving world making minute pieces of antimatter because they can. I’m not complaining. They have taught me heaps. However…..!
It turns out that they don’t really have to because bananas are producing it all the time as they decay. In fact, everything does, even you and me. Says so in the article. It also turns out that at the Big Bang, the balance in antimatter verses matter was not quite equal. A tiny speck of matter survived to end up being the beginning of the world we all know and love, (but are intent on destroying to make money. (Does that make us antimatter I wonder?)
I’m a patterns thinker. I just am. It’s the way I work with my clients: discovering the patterns programmed into them in childhood, that keep repeating throughout life until we call them out, beginning conscious change. So, it was inevitable that I would see a pattern in all this wonderful science. Stay with me. A small dot of life, created by a big explosion that created the beginnings of life, occurs every time a child is conceived. The negative and positive forces of Mum and Dad come together in the cataclysmic orgasmic act of intercourse, causing that little particle-like being to begin its journey in time and space.
However, this continual creation could not continue endlessly, (as we are finding out personally with populations explosions of humans) or the Universe would be a big fat pudding of unending matter. The Life experiment was designed to have limitations. As new matter is constantly created, so the matter that has had its experience must drop off the conveyor belt, to create enough space to allow more. Our individual pattern mirroring the new-born Universe. We have slightly more matter than antimatter, but as our life continues, we manufacture increasing amounts of antimatter that begins destroying our matter slowly as we age. Like the banana, we decay over time, beginning somewhere in our 20s, ending for us all somewhere in our last decades, if nothing untoward happens to accelerate that.
Whether we die prematurely or go to sleep in our dotage, to never wake up, the dance of the matter-twins goes on until we are all gone. We can watch it happen: a corpse decaying, a plant withering. It’s just our antimatter overtaking our matter. But as the article points out, when they do collide, a huge amount of energy is released back into the system, informing the whole, made available for the formation of new life in all sorts of forms.
It reminds me of a section of Phillip Pullman’s book The Golden Compass where he describes souls being released to flow out into Nature’s energy field, joining the Whole yet again. I like to think of me being recycled in that efficient way. We have mostly been brought up with some sort of religious mythology, telling stories of afterlives as either a reward for being good, or punishment for going against the cultural norm, but for me that sort of binary outcome does not do it. It may well have been fine for the centuries past, relying on what they then knew to describe the process. For the 21st century the narrative needs to be different. Reuse, recycle, reclaim may fit better, in a world continually fighting death, while turning Life into an everlasting pudding of matter, in an oven of climate change.
So, the understanding that there was always a built-in fail-safe from the outset is a very elegant way of solving the problem. It allows for ongoing renewal as those like me are reaching their time of redundancy. There is nothing to fear about this. It’s not hell. It’s not even heaven. No, it’s called equilibrium, as everything continues to rebalance itself and the conveyor belt of time and change carries us forward on our energetic journey. We burst out of this form in a blaze of energetic glory, returning to the beginning, knowing ourselves for the first time. (Credit to T. S. Elliot for the mangle words I have just misquoted).