In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife

by Sebastian Junger

The word apocalypse comes from the Greek, apokalupsis, to “uncover,” because all knowledge is said to be revealed in the final collapse. A last, terrifying, theory proposes that it is cosmically prohibited to have that knowledge beforehand because consciousness cannot survive a complete understanding of itself, and as physicists get closer to the final, apocalyptic truth, test results become more and more unreliable until, for example, entangled particles in Tenerife appear to reach back and fix outcomes for twinned particles in La Palma, and our credulity around such things is how the cosmos reaches back to trick us and fix a far greater outcome: that the ultimate truth must never be known, because once the knower understands that he is the entirety of all things, the universe becomes fatally self-referential and collapses back into a closed spacetime of zero radius with all values headed to zero and all history annihilated.