A Book Review (sort of): Dark Matter by Blake Crouch
Reading the book Dark Matter by Blake Crouch has prompted me to put to writing a somewhat wandering idea, an opinion or maybe let's call it some loose thoughts. Good book, I'd recommend it if you like an interesting, thought-provoking suspense science fiction thriller. It's all about multi-verses, without the superheroes. A scientist is able to build a small one room cubical box, that allows a person to travel and physically land in another version of their current world. The landing spot is all based on the traveler's mind and what they are thinking. If they survive the world they landed in, they can return to the box and keep searching. Their state of mind had better not be having nightmares or bad memories, because guess where you'll land when you open the box door!
Now let’s start wandering and see where we go. I have a good friend, has great job, he’s very intelligent, and solid family man. He’s a Creationist, the Bible’s Book of Genesis, with the world being created in a week, some 5,000 years ago. I love paleontology, anthropology, archeology, any natural history. They are my hobbies. My friend and I have had a few polite and civil discussions over our differing views and have always agreed to disagree. I’m a big bang guy, although not in any random occurrence type of thing. There are way too many things that had to and still have to occur, within some very tight constraints to say it's a random occurrence. To me, there is a guiding hand in all of our being.
I often cringe when I hear someone ask, “Is there intelligent life out there in the universe, another earth?” Number one: Why can't there be? Number two: Excuse me, but exactly where do you get the idea that our earth’s human inhabitants are all that intelligent and should be used as some type of yardstick for success. Has there ever been peace on our earth where humans are involved? You'll have to look hard to find a decade or two in a row where some King, some Dictator, some elected politician isn't attempting to gain additional power by brutal force. Around the globe, we’ve done a horrendous job of ending diseases, poverty, abuse, human trafficking, racism, hate, global warming, greed and corruption. The moon can be seen with the naked eye but look at our struggle just to get there. We clearly have accomplishments but are we really some standard to be measured against?
A conservative number of galaxies in our universe is around 200 billion. Picture an inverted triangle and at the wide top, you start with the 200 billion galaxies. Keep travelling into space, deeper and deeper, down to the point of the triangle. as the triangle gets narrower, you find the original 100 billion galaxies, then the original 100 million, then the original 100 until you finally reach the one original galaxy. What if that single original galaxy contained some unimaginable power source, some being, something beyond our comprehension that is responsible for the creation of all other galaxies?
When I’ve sat through films that talk about multiverses, I have often let the idea float around in my head that maybe it’s not just fiction, or some screen writer’s fantasy. Would some type of multiverse offer some explanation on a heaven or hell, or the resurrection of the dead? In Dark Matter, page 112, Crouch is explaining dark matter as “A new form of matter. Exactly. Some string theorists think it might be a clue to the existence of the multiverse.” Another quote from the book caught my attention also. On page 132, Crouch is writing about free will, which is always a stumbling block when you set it against the idea that God has a plan for each of us. Are we free to act? Crouch wrote, “And we think it stops there, but that's only true if every outcome is inevitable, if free will is an illusion, and our worldline is solitary. What if our worldline is just one of an infinite number of worldlines, some only slightly altered from the life we know, others drastically different?”
What’s possible?
