Revelation, Rationality, Knowledge & Truth — Page 331
ENTROPY AND THE FINITE UNIVERSE eternally remote from us. Looking back at the past from any point in time, eternity will appear as endless as it would appear when viewed from another point in time. In other words, eternity can never be chased to any moment in time beyond which it does not exist. Anyone can imagine himself chasing eternity backwards in time. Even if he travels in the direction of the past for trillions times trillions times trillions of years, sitting on the shoulders of light, he could never find its other end. If he did he should rest assured he was barking up the wrong tree it was not eternity he was chasing!. Now imagine him once again, travelling backwards in search of a universe. If he ever finds one, eternity would snatch it away from his hand and shove it back onto the path of endlessness yet again. A difficult idea to conceive but in reality it is quite simple and easy to understand. If such a hypothetical traveller in time finds any trace of the universe, he should inquire from himself as to why this universe had not dwindled out of existence long before he had caught up with it. The traveller could easily work out that beyond that point in time, entropy had enough time left to swallow an endless number of such universes. . Imagine a colossal figure big enough to accommodate a myriad of gigantic time steps and try to fill eternity with them. The figure will, most certainly, come to an end but not eternity. Even if entropy required a trillion raised to the power of a trillion years to bring about the 'heat death' of the universe, it would still be inevitable. Now return from this hypothetical pursuit into the past to the present and enquire from yourself why does this universe around you exist at this point in time? Should it not have been completely destroyed by entropy so that it could not have continued to escape detection during its flight into the endless past? 320