Exhalation

by Ted Chiang

“Science is not just the search for the truth,” he said. “It’s the search for purpose.”

That is why the creation of the universe is a miracle: because what happened in that moment was not a necessary consequence of what preceded it.

Set up a rack of billiard balls and execute a flawless break. Imagine the table has no pockets and is frictionless, so the balls just keep rebounding, never coming to a stop; how accurately can you predict the path of any given ball as it collides against the others? In 1978, the physicist Michael Berry calculated that you could predict only nine collisions before you would need to account for the gravitational effect of a person standing in the room. If your initial measurement of a ball’s position is off by even a nanometer, your prediction becomes useless within a matter of seconds.

In effect, we are consuming order and generating disorder; we live by increasing the disorder of the universe.

It’s only because the universe started in a highly ordered state that we are able to exist at all.