Thinking in reverse
Summary: The night the universe conspired against me, or how to get from the worm to the cheeseburger without solving the order of the chicken-and-the-egg first.
It was just a quarter past eleven on a Saturday night, March 29th, and years of careful arrangements were about to come together in another victory. I was getting seated in a small Greek restaraunt just across the street from a train station, ousted from the platform by a wet and miserable night shower, and chased into the inviting eatery just in time for the final stages of the scheme to manifest: I dried my glasses off with a napkin, ordered a cheeseburger, and heard this song come over the radio. I have to give it to them, they really engineered it good this time.
But before I can tell you about the song I heard, I need to go back in time a few minutes. The walk to the train station was damp and the black sky was spitting in prelude to a drencher. The streetlights made the paved walkway that ran between the sports fields all shiny, and everywhere I looked were hundreds of pink strands draped across the bitumen. They squirmed and tugged themselves through the puddles that formed on the uneven walking surface, and I suddenly realized I was tip-toeing through a mass migration of earthworms. The universe had called them out on this night with the soothing patter of raindrops on grass, the moderate temperature, and the safety from hungry songbirds that the darkness implicitly guaranteed. I realized with chagrin that I'd obviously been made to forget my umbrella as well, so I wouldn't cast a shadow at my feet and fail to see where I was treading.
You might think it's odd that the universe would go to such absurd lengths to protect a mere worm, but then of course, the universe doesn't see any difference between me—a human being—and a limbless creature that noses its way though dirt. Both are practically cousins (give or take a few billion generations). Both leave the other alone for the most part. And both last for about the same amount of time.
Let me try to sell you on that last point. Earthworms live for 10 years at the very most, and humans have been known to live until 120, but from the universe's point of view that's not a whole lot of difference. I can show this better with a relative timeline:
I've compressed this diagram so that each notch represents time in seconds in powers of ten. At 1010 you've got 10,000,000,000 seconds, or about 317 years, but at 10-10 is only 0.000,000,000,1 seconds. The shortest physically meaningful span of time is the chronon, also known as the Planck time-scale after the physicist Max Planck, and is only 10-43 seconds long. That means there are ten thousand times more chronons in every second than there are cubic centimeters in a sphere the size of Earth's orbit. The shortest lived physical particles known to man are called resonances and they last for about 10-23 of a second, which is an eternity compared to a chronon. So when you get to a full day, and then a year, you're talking about seriously whopping huge mega-giganto-'normous spans of time. You just can't imagine how long one second is. Nearly all of the universe's most impressive accomplishments took place in the first second of the big bang. And as you see from the diagram, our respective lifespans are in such high digits that it barely makes a difference whether one lives for ten years, or a hundred. It's only a single power of ten higher—I mean, big whoop.
And there were 103s of some of the universe's most permanent features stretched out on the sidewalk, squirming through the puddles and trying not to arrive under my shoes as I sloshed through the drizzle on my way to an unwitting appointment with fate.
If I were to recall an hour earlier in the evening, I was in the audience of a wisened old man (about 109.35 seconds old) who had travelled from across a continent to tell me the secrets of the universe. The old man in question was a scribe, an oracle, nay a prophet even. Many earthworm lifespans ago he'd begun his career as a television scriptwriter, a short story weaver, and a novellist. He'd penned over 103 essays and short stories, about 102 books, and spoken to perhaps 106 souls as part of his preparation to speak to me that night. He warmed up his audience (a packed auditorium to keep me company) with humorous anecdotes and then, when I was hypnotized, he programmed me with an important idea.
“Don't look on the Internet, you can't learn anything on the Internet. Well, maybe you can learn what you were looking for at that time, but you don't learn anything else. I could look up one word on the Internet instead of flipping through the Encyclopedia Britannica, but then I'd miss the twenty other words I want to use as well!“
Three hours of travel, sixty bucks in tickets, passes and food were instantly justified.
Why I hadn't thought of this more was only the fault of myself, because for I-don't-know-how-long I had been thinking in the wrong direction. Forwards instead of backwards, or backwards instead of forwards. Did I need to go forward to the word I wanted, or backwards to stumble upon the ones I needed? This was not the idea that called the basic order of the universe into question, but rather the order at which its order was examined.
You can think in the wrong direction for so long that it soon seems to be the only way. The early naturologists began by asking “why am I here?” and explained the universe in terms of how it applied to their well being, the so-called Anthropic Principle. I needed to eat meat, so a cow was arranged for. But a cow needed to eat vegetation, so grass was arranged for. And grass needed fertile soil, and fertile soil needed the earthworm to keep it loose and to tug the rotting matter down below the surface where it could give up its nutrients and complete the cycle.
Forwards in time, and backwards in my essay, I'm in the Greek restaurant, and ready for my appointment with a song.
They sure had outdone themselves. Faced with the problem of getting me to hear it at a quarter past eleven on a Saturday night, the universe had concocted an elaborate plan: first the right songwriter would be chosen and inspired, then teamed up with the right singer, who'd then record the music so the record company could release an album.
But the next part was just brilliant: faced with getting me to listen to it, they arranged for the artist, songwriter and producer to get called up to the stage at the Grammy awards eight times and get loaded up with more trophies than they had room for in their car. This then guaranteed the placement of the song on the heavy-rotation list of every radio station in the country, ready to run it past my ears after the scheduled rainshower evicted me from the train station and into the restaraunt who, since the first brick had been laid in its construction, were destined to leave their PA system tuned into the selected frequency exactly when it had to be.
Remarkable, and it worked. The mopping-up phase of the plan was to get the supermarket I shop at to stock the album in their checkout-lane's impulse-buy shelves. Mission accomplished.
I was travelling back home on the train by midnight, and I sat in the rearward facing chairs, staring out of the window at wet streets receding into the distance. If you ever find yourself shooting backwards through space on a train, play a mental game with yourself: try to imagine that the universe is busy assembling new things behind you for you to see and judge. And imagine that if you turn around and look forwards you'd only see a black void. This is a game I used to play in childhood during family trips because it put me in a certain frame of mind: on one hand the lay of the land was fixed and not going to alter itself for my benefit, but since I didn't already know what the layout was, I couldn't be aware of divine intervention changing it for me anyway—leaving open the possibility that something magic had happened after all.
This is not an advertisement for a destiny-based philosophy, but a mental utility. Let's suppose you invented the Internet Encyclopedia and it made books obsolete so fast they soon ceased to exist. Wouldn't someone soon have the bright idea of printing out some of the encyclopedia's contents onto paper sheets and binding them into books so you could flip through it and find things you didn't know you needed to find? Sure there would.
Or let's suppose your fashionable friends think cool music is only what hasn't gone mainstream yet. Think backwards: what if I was so exclusive the entire goddamn universe plotted and schemed to get me to buy some album by whatever means necessary. Isn't that cooler?
Or what about those times when you felt that a minute wasn't enough time to get any work done? Think backwards on the logarithmic scale: given that you can divide a second into an infinite number of slices, and that work can and does get done in fragments too small to notice, there's conceptually no limit to what can get done in a billionth of your lifespan. Being absolutely serious, this is what computers are for.
Or how about those naturologists who couldn't figure out why the earthworm would deign to occupy its miserable existence just so I could exist to enjoy a cheeseburger? Think backwards: there was food in the dirt, and you had to be long, skinny and slimy in order to go after it. The grass in turn took advantage of the worm's industry, and the ancestor of cows took advantage of this freely available green food, and then man came along and invented the spear and then the cattle ranch so he could roast one of those fat mooers on an open grill.
My evening ended sometime after one 'o clock in the morning. Somewhere behind me the universe was cleaning up after itself. The prophet was removing himself back to the Los Angelean ranch he came from. The train was headed to other stations to rehearse the art of transport and be ready for my next ride. The taxi that took me to my doorstep was subsidizing my fare by amortizing its costs across other customers. The worms were retreating back into their muddy domain to keep the lawn maintained for my next visit.
And Norah Jones was on the radio one more goddamn time.
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