To an infinite Universe the calorific death might come or might not; to this finite Universe, the Universe that is, in irreversibility of entropy it must.
The soul rebels.
The Universe shall not die! Space shall be infinite. That whole cosmos of theirs, which embraces the uttermost nebulae, which sweeps a thousand million times wider than the trillion-mile pitiful corner seen from Mount Wilson, around which light, swiftest of all things, takes one hundred thousand million years to travel, it is but a bubble enwombed in the ether, in empty ether stretching out to infinity. And entropy of infinity is a phrase that has no sense—no, not even in transcendental physics. The law of degradation breaks down. We are saved.
Light can reconstitute matter; can build up stars to start all over again. It is last year’s newest evangel.
Entropy is only an average, a probability, and so must sometimes fail; as sometimes heat does pass from cold nebulae to warmer stars, as one day those apes will ride the Tempest, and red outrun black even till it break the heavenly bank.
If Wärmetod must happen, why has it not happened already, happened always? If the calorific stillness were inevitable it must, unless the fundamental laws have changed, unless temperature was once infinitely irregular—which is not sense, no not even in thermodynamics—have come long ago, been eternally. There must always have been entropy; there can never have been a Universe.—Yet one is there; here.
Here for an hour; and here because it is not infinite, no more in time than in space. It could escape the warmth-death only to die the time-death. Either way, every way, the Clock runs down.
What started the Clock? Who? How? And before? And after?
We are beaten. We revolve on a wheel; scuttle round in a trap.
The world must have perished, the world is here—this antithesis between reasoned theory and apprehended fact, between on the one side the indirect inevitable-seeming consequence of a system devised by our brains and on the other side the direct deliverance of our senses, is a shadow of that sharper antithesis, the antithesis between things as delivered by our senses and things as they are. The world of indirect apprehension or scientific description—the world that this book is full of—is one step yet farther than the sham world of direct apprehension from whatever reality may be; it is a self-contained world of imagination, a mythical mechanism working itself, worked by itself; expounding, in a circle vicious and aimless, one set of phenomena it assumes in terms of other such phenomena; and having, except at the place or moment, where the brain seizes hold of the deliverance of the senses as raw material for its constructions, no contact again with even the mock-show of appearance, still less with the reality beyond—if there be one. Atoms and molecules, solar shapes and nebulae; fire and water, cold and collision; matter and energy, millions and millionths; time and space, past and future; first cause and final outcome, End and No End: all are names, words, counters, symbols, wraiths, thin-spun abstractions of abstractions. Science is a shorthand based on these symbols, a game played with these counters, a creed recited with these words, an incantation formed with these names, a metrical ghost-world filled with these gibbering wraiths, the arch-abstraction refined from these abstractions of abstractions.
Its so-called facts are interpretative guesses. Its so-called laws are invented by our minds, not presented by the things themselves. Were our minds different, the apparent world would be different, and its apparent laws. Suppose we were one sense short, blind every one of us. Then the Universe we should apprehend would be a different Universe, while in itself remaining (perhaps) the same Universe. Suppose we had one sense more. Then the cosmos would be different again, a place now unimagined and unimaginable, though still itself remaining (who knows?) the same cosmos. Suppose thought were different, other than analytic,
