Probable Impossibilities: Musings on Beginnings and Endings

by Alan Lightman

Man] is equally incapable of seeing the Nothing from which he was made, and the Infinite in which he is swallowed up.

A great philosopher of science, Karl Popper, once said that a proposition is not scientific unless it can be falsified—that is, unless one can perform an experiment that proves it wrong. At any given moment in history, the scientific theories and ideas we endorse are those that have not been falsified. If we can never test the infinities of the small and the infinities of the large, perhaps these notions are not scientific after all. But they are certainly vibrant in the realm of the imagination. —

Einstein once wrote, “The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science.”

How did it all begin? Far beyond our own lives, far beyond our community or our nation or planet Earth or even our solar system. How did the universe begin? It is a luxury to be able to ask such questions. It is also a human necessity.

Each of us emerged from the cells of our parents, who emerged from their parents, who emerged from their parents, back and back through the dark halls of time.

I often wonder: Where are they now, my deceased mother and father? I know the materialist explanation, but that does nothing to relieve my longing for them, or the impossible truth that they do not exist.

Now that my second parent has passed away, all things seem strange.

Human beings have a conflicted relationship to this order-disorder nexus. We are alternately attracted from one to the other. We admire principles and laws and order. We embrace reasons and causes. We seek predictability. Some of the time. On other occasions, we value spontaneity, unpredictability, novelty, unconstrained personal freedom.

We might respect those who manage to live sensibly and lead upright lives.

But we also esteem the mavericks who break the mold, and we celebrate the wild, the unbridled, and the unpredictable in ourselves.

Spirituality does not require belief in miracles.

Almost certainly, there are other thinking beings out there in the infinity of space who have their own astronomers and physicists and biologists (and painters and writers), and who have reached the same conclusion. We will likely never exchange a single word, but we have all realized the rarity of our existence and connection to one another.