100TWC - Day 7: Eternity

There's a trick to eternity. It has to do with elephants. Elephants and sand.

"How do you eat an elephant?" management trainees are sometimes asked. You can't, they say (unless they've ever, at any time in their lives, been on the Internet); it's too big. Well, says the tutor smugly, with your puny management trainee brains, YOU might think it's impossible. It's not impossible. It's just big. And big things are easy to cope with - if you break them down. So the traditional answer to the question "how do you eat an elephant?" is: one bite at a time.

So with unassailable logic, I submit that eternity is not impossibly big to deal with either. You just have to consider it one moment at a time. You might not know that a moment does, in fact, have a defined length. It's a medieval time unit approximately equal to one and one-half minutes. 90 seconds.

There's a lot of 90 secondses in eternity. Work it out. If eternity goes on forever, then how many moments - how many chunks of 90 seconds - are then in it? Well, as Aleksandr might say: Simples! An infinite number. Aha! you're thinking. Your logic is not as unassailable as you think. If there's an infinite number of moments in eternity then no matter how quickly you consider each one, you'll never get to the end. You could spend an eternity considering eternity's moments, and you'd still have an eternity left to go.

That's the thing with infinite numbers. They're not finite.

OK so maybe the elephant approach was a bad start. How about the sand thing? I'm guessing William Blake wasn't as much of a physicist as Lewis Carroll was a mathematician, but even so he may have been onto something when he wrote

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

Easy. All we have to do is find that world in a grain of sand and we'll not only have compressed eternity into an hour, but we might even have regained our lost innocence. The poetry of innocents may be dashed by the literal interpretations of physicists, but there is also poetry to be found in physics. Not to mention beauty. Don't believe me? Take a look at some fractal pictures. Consider the movements of planets, and the unexpected behaviours of sub-atomic particles (see yesterday's 100TWC challenge).

So is there a world in a grain of sand? Since that grain is the result of millennia of erosion by the sea, wind and ice, you could say it's undergone a world of change. If it were then to find itself on the seabed, compressed by millions of tons of similar grains resting on top of it, and subjected to the elevated temperatures closer to the Earth's core, it may very well find itself transmuted into sandstone. Yet more millennia later, after being erupted from the seabed through tectonic action, that same sandstone may well be mined and quarried, possibly built into a drystone wall; a church; a crofter's cottage, or even transported through prehistoric means and carved into one of the sarsens of Stonehenge. There may not be a world in the sandstone, but there is a world of possibility.

Each of these writing challenges only lasts half an hour. That's (*calculates*) 20 moments. If, by any stretch of the imagination, I've managed to emulate Blake, then I may have succeeded in holding half of eternity in that half-hour. Unfortunately, according to the mathematics of infinite numbers, that means I still have all of it left to deal with.