You waking up this morning. Having breakfast. Going to work. Hanging out with your friends. Watching a Netflix series, maybe binge-watching it. You are repeating it. Literally repeating every bit of what you are doing. You were late to office today? You have been late to office today, a lot many times before.
“This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more.”
Nietzsche, a German philosopher, cultural critic, composer, poet, philologist, and Latin and Greek scholar, the youngest ever to hold the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel in 1869 introduced the Theory of Eternal Return, according to which the universe and all existence and energy has been recurring, and will continue to recur, in a self-similar form an infinite number of times across infinite time or space.
Are you happy to know that?
According to Nietzsche, the answer to this question depends on how you live your life right now. If the answer is yes, then your life according to you is worth living. He first brought it up in his book “The Gay Science”. This was an attempt to understand the meaning of life and how it works. This theory might seem to be a sudden conclusion but this can actually be related to some theories in physics. This theory is hypothetical and cannot be proved, but if we look into the private writings of Nietzsche, this was something he earnestly believed in.
The Big Bounce Theory
Most of us know that everything started with a big bang, but this bouncing theory states that the big bang was just one moment of big explosion. The Big Bang theory says that our universe began as a point of infinite gravity and density called a singularity. But to question in this regard is where did this singularity come from? For an explanation to have staying power, it needs to solve a few problems physicists have been puzzling over for a long time. The biggest one? The universe has surprisingly low entropy.
Entropy is a term for disorder. For example, ice has very low entropy because the water molecules within it are very well managed. But what if this ice melts? It doesn’t form ice back from water. Everything proceeds to disorder. Then why is the universe in the opposite direction? Or, is it?
The only explanation is that the universe had even lower entropy at its birth than it does today.
This is what brings us to the conclusion that the singularity before the big bang had something before it. The ever-repeating universe?
There are many more theories like The Big Bounce Theory, but what if this one was true? If it is the exact same matter and energy contracting into a singularity over and over again, making The Big Bang explosion again and again, and if presumably, the rules of the universe don’t change, then won’t the exact same sequence of events play out every single time — right down to the breakfast you had this morning?
This theory of Big Bounce and all other theories that tell us the stories before The Big Bang are not accepted by scientists. The most accepted theory remains that of the Big Bang and scientists believe that the universe is just spreading and expanding and going on and on to dissolve into nothing.
But even if The Big Bounce was accepted, it cannot be assured that everything that we did in the past universes, is the same what we are doing in this universe. Even the Butterfly Effect taken into consideration, that there can be huge differences if even a little distraction was caused in the events of the earliest stages of the universe, we cannot say that we are repeating everything.
But because no one really knows, maybe you have read this story before.
“Every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence — even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!” — Friedrich Nietzsche
