In more recent decades, the science of more difficult-to-prove things has had to compete with technology’s gigantic lurches and surges forward as the thought to inception of things immediately functional (like hard drives and wireless networks) has only happened faster. The result was not faster science, but ‘fad science.’ The race to be the first to say something revolutionary has infected minds otherwise obsessed with the old, question, observe, record and repeat method.

I certainly will not be interpreted as writing that Hawking and friends are guilty of being fad-scientists. I know they are far from it. But what I read reminded me of something I once thought many years ago and dissuaded myself from writing in a completely unresearched book of mostly unfounded claims about the great unknown. Thanks to fad science and the deliciously easy steps needed to publish on the Internet, here we go anyway!

Let’s hold something true: Matter can be neither created nor destroyed, it just transfers. Good. Now on with the rest of the show…

When I was in fourth grade, I learned that Mathematics is broken. Zero isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. When the class insisted that zero divided by anything should, in fact, be something, the teacher just insisted that we couldn’t do that. I still think we were on to something and I remain disenchanted with modern Mathematics to this day. Why aren’t there two or three kinds of zeros? One of them is a place holder, one of them means that something could be there but isn’t and some third zero that abstractly shifts between the first two might also benefit science and Mathematics.

If I show you a kitchen counter with no eggs and ask you how many eggs there are, you say, ‘none.’ If I then ask how many there could be, you look at me like I’m a jerk.

If I show you a kitchen counter with an empty egg carton on it and ask how many eggs there are, you say, ‘none.’ If I then ask how many there could be, you say, ‘twelve,’ sparing me the look because it’s somehow obvious.

Now why aren’t those two ‘zero’ answers different when the potential for something to be there is so plainly different? It seems to me that the next big advance in Mathematics will instantly antiquate all of us from the Twentieth Century. We’ll seem as dopey as those dopes from the Nineteenth Century pooping in wooden boxes and prancing around on ponies. We’ll be the dopes poking around on circuit boards without knowing any real math. ‘How did we ever survive the Twentieth Century,’ future dopes will ask.

I like the Big Bang theory. Liking it so much and so often means that I also like what came to be called the Recurring Big Bang theory: First there’s nothing, then there’s a lot of heat, then there’s a bang and then there’s everything; Everything starts pulling back together, then there’s nothing, then there’s a lot of heat and, what do you know? Another bang!

I won’t credit the Recurring Big Bang theory with being the Fad Science start-up, but I remember it making news like a ten alarm fire would make news. Our universe acting like a yo-yo firecracker seasoned the flavor of conversations at Silver Diner where I would go, instead of to school, to conceive my fictional sci-fi television show.

I like fractals. You look at a fern and pluck off a strand from the center and you’re still looking at the fern. In a vain attempt to destroy what you see, you pluck a leaf from the strand and you’re STILL looking at the fern. Before you explode, you examine the veins on the bumps on the leaf from the strand from the plant to determine if you have only one last level to destroy to accomplish what you set out to do. Checkmate. Nature has placed the fern in the pattern of the veins.

I prefer fractals with variations. Only computer generated fractals spew endless generations of fractal babies with perfect likenesses to their parent fractals. I believe that in nature, little hiccups and variations are the ‘norm,’ perfectly acceptable and absolutely required for such a lovely place to live in. As I thought more about the characters in my sci-fi show, I stirred my coffee briskly and then added the cream slowly in the center, watching it fan out and catch inside the spinning ribbons of liquid as was my habit.

A Universe became visible.

Here was my little, solitary cup of coffee mimicking a vastly larger and more complex noun before my very eyes on table 36. Actually, maybe this was a galaxy I was looking at. Even more ‘actuallier’ (more actual than actual) was the likelihood that this swirl was a new solar system where the spinning ribbons would pull together to form planets and moons. Aha. Fractals: I was looking at them all! A solar system, a galaxy and a Universe. They had all banged out from the center. Would my coffee recur, I wondered.

I thought about the new Recurring Big Bang theory. What of the bits of universe that were farthest from the center where gravity would allegedly pull everything back together? I consulted my coffee. It looked to me as though physics would allow for those distant bits to be left behind and be stranded at the edges of whatever balled together before the next Big Bang. This would indeed produce not a one ‘verse, but a many ‘verse – a ‘multiverse’ I called it. Old bits of earlier Universe left behind would be left to the whim of their own, separate physics because, after all, matter can be neither created nor destroyed, but it can be left behind. My sci-fi characters now had an infinite number of possible adventures.

Accepting that fractals hold true through to the largest nouns ever known from the smallest and still accepting that matter cannot go away or arrive spontaneously, we arrive at the horrible, anticlimactic end of everything. This is no tour of force; no second life awaits you; send the kids to the next room. It’s only morose from here out.

There’s no way that I can be the first to think this. I’m sure that many an idle existential thinker has come to this conclusion with much less thinking of the great unknown along the way. My only claim to this idea (Remember: “the race to say something revolutionary first…”) is the way in which it occurred as a possibility to me.

Matter will settle into a perfect balance that abhors life and light as the unbalancing disruptions that they are.

Anything that ‘works’ requires an imbalance of some kind. The water wheel always weighs heavier on one side and so, keeps spinning to balance itself. The beast always falls forward and catches itself with a foot and so keeps walking.

The universe that we live in seems to work so hard at every level to keep things quiet. Water and wind erode constantly; gravity pulls endlessly; light burns and bleaches daily. It’s enough to keep a civilization really working hard to keep the easy life from disintegrating.

When I was in a two-hundred level photography class on my way to the three-hundred levels, we learned that, visually, the gray between black and white is really only 18% black and 82% white. This 18% gray got me thinking about the many ways that the universe seemed to work to neutralize everything imaginable. Heat transfers in temperatures and how cooler things move less at the molecular level, etc.

I imagined the universe as a very unsettled, stirred up cup of coffee. I added cream and life and light and got swirls and eddies and ribbons of light in the dark liquid. After almost a minute, I got an even spread of coffee with creamer. I still picture black and white rather than brown and off-white and see the universe’s finished product as a vast field of 18% gray where nothing moves and nothing lives. All the energy and matter that had ever been in a leaf, a star, a child or a thought was still and silent.

There you and Hawking have it. Multiverses, cups of coffee, fractals, and a future made up of everything, but full of nothing; a zero. But then we come to the beginning, don’t we? What is nothing? Zero certainly doesn’t describe the nothingness of 18% gray and all the energy and matter in it. All our laughter in theaters while watching comic films and all the frustrations and longings we felt for others over cocktails at the bar or over romantic dinners and all the sound made in a lifetime of quiet whispered promises are out there somewhere in that vast field of 18% gray. Can we really say it ends in a zero although every noun and verb that we ever held dear is out there? Perhaps a potential exists for the same nouns and verbs to exist again. Perhaps this zero is different.