So it was perfect that I happened upon this nearly two-year old article on Wired that really helped connect the dots. Typically, the ponderings of any grandiose bigger picture is a futile exercise in mental masturbation, leaving me weary, nonplussed, and more often than not, right back where I started (just ask Jimmy).

It’s not that today’s adventure isn’t of a similar circular nature, but it’s not often I get solid answers to Big questions that leave me content, fulfilled, and left with a renewed sense of clarity and purpose.

The piece in question is an interview with Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicist at Caltech who gives a surprisingly digestible answer to an age-old paradox: what is time?

Time, it’s omnipresent in our ability to perceive reality and fundamental to the laws of nature, yet our ability to define and understand it remains elusive. In the world of physics, it is strangely unique and why time travel, for instance, makes no sense.

“Because what you think of as your future is in the universe’s past. So it can’t be one in the same everywhere. And that’s not incompatible with the laws of physics, but it’s very incompatible with our everyday experience, where we can make choices that affect the future, but we cannot make choices that affect the past.”

Mass can be turned into energy, and back into mass again, but time is irreversible. It has direction, what Carroll calls “the arrow of time.”

“[This] goes back to Einstein and spacetime and how we measure time using clocks. But the particular aspect of time that I’m interested in is the arrow of time: the fact that the past is different from the future. We remember the past but we don’t remember the future. There are irreversible processes. There are things that happen, like you turn an egg into an omelet, but you can’t turn an omelet into an egg.”

In an effort to illustrate this one-way street in 1870, Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann turned to the second law of thermodynamics: entropy.

“Entropy is just a measure of how disorderly things are. And it tends to grow. That’s the second law of thermodynamics: Entropy goes up with time, things become more disorderly. So, if you neatly stack papers on your desk, and you walk away, you’re not surprised they turn into a mess. You’d be very surprised if a mess turned into neatly stacked papers. That’s entropy and the arrow of time. Entropy goes up as it becomes messier.”

Boltzmann immediately saw the relation between the arrow of time and entropy, a connection that fits neatly within our understanding of the universe since we began with a Big Bang, a state of extremely high entropy that is still fueling our current expansion into empty chaos.

But it won’t go on forever, Carroll explains.

“The arrow of time doesn’t move forward forever. There’s a phase in the history of the universe where you go from low entropy to high entropy. But then once you reach the locally maximum entropy you can get to, there’s no more arrow of time. It’s just like this room. If you take all the air in this room and put it in the corner, that’s low entropy. And then you let it go and it eventually fills the room and then it stops. And then the air’s not doing anything. In that time when it’s changing, there’s an arrow of time, but once you reach equilibrium, then the arrow ceases to exist.”

Eventually everything settles down and there is no entropy left. Time stops. Our universe, too, suffers a distinct death.

Of course, the natural next step is to wonder: what happens before and after then? How did any of this come to be? Answering this has become Carroll’s mission.

“Why were the papers neatly stacked in the universe? Basically, our observable universe begins around 13.7 billion years ago in a state of exquisite order, exquisitely low entropy. It’s like the universe is a wind-up toy that has been sort of puttering along for the last 13.7 billion years and will eventually wind down to nothing. But why was it ever wound up in the first place? Why was it in such a weird low-entropy unusual state?”

“That is what I’m trying to tackle. I’m trying to understand cosmology, why the Big Bang had the properties it did. And it’s interesting to think that connects directly to our kitchens and how we can make eggs, how we can remember one direction of time, why causes precede effects, why we are born young and grow older. It’s all because of entropy increasing. It’s all because of conditions of the Big Bang.”

Which brings us to one of the prevailing theories (or theory of theories, I should say, since we are a long way off from devising realistic experiments): that of the multiverse, a term coined in 1895 by the American philosopher and psychologist William James to describe the mother of all universes, that which comprises the entirety of space, time, matter, and energy, including all of the fundamental laws that define them. It is, for all intents and purposes, a “perfect” system.

But just as the Matrix Trilogies cleverly deduced, every “perfect” system is inherently imperfect.

“So the whole point of this idea that I’m trying to develop is that the answer to the question, “Why do we see the universe around us changing?” is that there is no way for the universe to truly be static once and for all. There is no state the universe could be in that would just stay put for ever and ever and ever. If there were, we should settle into that state and sit there forever.”

This simply cannot be. We know this because we exist. “I think, therefore I am.” So instead,we have imperfection, strategically built-in volatility.

“It’s like a ball rolling down the hill, but there’s no bottom to the hill. The ball will always be rolling both in the future and in the past. So, that center part is locally static — that little region there where there seems to be nothing happening. But, according to quantum mechanics, things can happen occasionally. Things can fluctuate into existence. There’s a probability of change occurring.”

Every once in a while, change occurs, a new Neo is born, and in the case of the multiverse, entire worlds are created.

“The universe is kind of like an atomic nucleus. It’s not completely stable. It has a half-life. It will decay. If you look at it, it looks perfectly stable, there’s nothing happening … there’s nothing happening … and then, boom! Suddenly there’s an alpha particle coming out of it, except the alpha particle is another universe.”

These new baby-verses mirror their mother in almost every facet and interpretation, all of them except time. If we see time as an arrow moving from point A to point B, the multiverse sees only a point, the past, present, and future all in one. For the multiverse, reality is suspended. Time stands still.

“There’s different moments in the history of the universe and time tells you which moment you’re talking about. And then there’s the arrow of time, which give us the feeling of progress, the feeling of flowing or moving through time. So that static universe in the middle has time as a coordinate but there’s no arrow of time. There’s no future versus past, everything is equal to each other.”

All of which sounds an awfully like what man, over the course of thousands of years, has spiritually come to understand as God, the omniscient entity, all knowing, all seeing, all defining, the Creator. He makes the rules and as such we feel his presence. It is why God is inside all of us.

Yet it remains physically impossible for us to perceive him or even comfortably contemplate existence. We exist only through the folds in which entropy unravels. We are, after all, victims of time, bounded by causality, while God operates freely, unhindered by memory, age, or metabolism, unrestricted. Such a “timeless” existence is simply beyond our comprehension.

And so we rely on faith and morality, innate to all humanity.

It can be no coincidence then that our major belief systems over time have come to converge at what now seems an inevitable point. From mono- to polytheism to the current status quo, religion has found a comfortable medium, so much that even a Harvard theologian would be hard pressed to discern many fundamental differences in any of the world’s major most subscribed to beliefs, everywhere from medieval Islam to 20th century New Age.

In the Matalib al-’Aliya, 12th century theologian and philosopher Fakhr al-Din al-Razi criticizes the idea of the Earth’s centrality within the universe and “explores the notion of the existence of a multiverse in the context of his commentary” on the Qur’anic verse, “All praise belongs to God, Lord of the Worlds.” He raises the question of whether the term “worlds” in this verse refers to “multiple worlds within this single universe or cosmos, or to many other universes or a multiverse beyond this known universe.”

Or as esotrencist P. D. Ouspensky puts it, “our mind follows the development of possibilities always in one direction only. But in fact every moment contains a very large number of possibilities. And all of them are actualised, only we do not see it and do not know it. We always see only one of the actualisations, and in this lie the poverty and limitation of the human mind. But if we try to imagine the actualisation of all the possibilities of the present moment, then of the next moment, and so on, we shall feel the world growing infinitely, incessantly multiplying by itself and becoming immeasurably rich and utterly unlike the flat and limited world we have pictured to ourselves up to this moment.”

Science too, in spite of an Enlightenment-spirited path of evidence, experiments and complex but tidy equations, has arrived at the same intersection.

But coming to terms with our mortality, perhaps more pressingly, our destiny can be suffocating. At least from God’s perspective, the future is already now. Does this, by definition, confirm the illusion of free will, while similarly sealing our fate to a timely abyss of nothing.

Maybe not. In the wonderful science fiction short story, the Last Question (1956), the brilliant Issac Asimov describes a future in which man has unlocked technology, allowing him to leave earth and colonize other planets, solar systems, and galaxies, in search of new resources to grow, propagate, and survive, and eventually, over the span of millions, billions, and trillions of years, take over every corner of our reality.

By then we have become an omnipresent, omniscient hive-mind, dispersed and interconnected, a self-described pseudo-god of our known universe. We have conquered everything.

Everything except entropy. To which end, any progress becomes meaningless. Unaddressed, our fate is certain. Infinity exists, but not for our universe.

“”It all had a beginning in the original cosmic explosion, whatever that was, and it’ll all have an end when all the stars run down. Some run down faster than others. Hell, the giants won’t last a hundred million years. The sun will last twenty billion years and maybe the dwarfs will last a hundred billion for all the good they are. But just give us a trillion years and everything will be dark.”

Entropy, that which separates us from multiverse, becomes our only way to ensure that this isn’t over yet, the final obstacle between us and truth. We must transcend our arrow of time so we, too, can be closer to God, or suffer the untimely non-existence of hell.

As Hindu Puranic literature states it in the Bahgavata Purana, 10.87.41: “Because You are unlimited, neither the lords of heaven nor even You Yourself can ever reach the end of Your glories. The countless universes, each enveloped in its shell, are compelled by the wheel of time to wander within You, like particles of dust blowing about in the sky. The śrutis, following their method of eliminating everything separate from the Supreme, become successful by revealing You as their final conclusion.”

Indeed, we are natural fighters of entropy in our perpetual effort to seek out order amidst the chaos, as gods of our own kingdoms. These are things we have always understood, even when we perhaps didn’t understand why.

At the end of the Last Question, just as the final star is about to flicker into oblivion, at the last possible moment, man finds a way. Now with the ability to reverse entropy, he utters these final (or first) words:

“Let there be light.”

Therein lies the true essence human nature, Asimov exudes. Beyond merely resembling Him, we aspire to become God, Himself.

Because all is for nought unless we strive for something truly be more, more than what it is to just be.

To be better.

The clock is ticking.