Why Matter?
Corwyn Green
(1997)
One day, all the tabloids carried the same story about a person who could make things spontaneously combust. In one, it was a fat guy in Texas who assured everyone that he had to look at the object that he wanted to spontaneously combust. But he could only do this to small objects, and only after saying nine Hail-Mary’s. In another, it was a woman from Oregon who found that small things vanished when she wasn’t looking at them. In another, it was an Eskimo shaman who lived in Florida. He claimed to be able to send things to the Eskimo spirit world, which American scientists perceived as spontaneous combustion. But in effect, it was all the same story in every tabloid, written in sentences beginning with “amazing” and ending with “scientists say”.
The next day, all the tabloids had mysteriously vanished. By evening, television reporters told the public about the disappearance of the tabloids. They talked to real scientists who insisted that the tabloids really had spontaneously combusted. Many people were very upset, suspecting the usual UFO’s, government coverups, and Divine intervention. Many others didn’t care how it happened, they were just glad it did and hoped that the cast of 90210 would follow suit. Yet, everyone had some opinion.
The next day, the sun didn’t shine because it had spontaneously combusted, but so had the earth and the rest of the solar system. The universe wasn’t affected because it too was gone. No things as strange and improbable as matter, energy, space, or time could exist in the clean nothingness the universe had become.
It was as if the universe had never existed, which in fact, it hadn’t, since “existed” implied the past, and “past” implied time, which didn’t exist.
No one cared or had any opinions. No one even cared.
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Last modification of this site: November 21, 1997
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