We find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end
wrote geologist James Hutton on viewing the strata at Siccar Point in 1785

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his friend, mathematician John Playfair, viewing the strata in 1788 remarked
the mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time

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        *

the dimensions of the present                   about three seconds
how can we know this                                  and are you here with me
wedged into the moment     time running out
don’t go don’t go                      I would stay here with you forever
which is less than the present            and doesn’t exist
but we exist for these three seconds don’t go

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       *

solar wheel           lunar wheel          orbital wheel
the galaxy’s flagrant pinwheel          as though
a hand had reached into a cloud of dust and gas
and spun it              like a stick in a bed of embers

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      *

consider the Orders of Magnitude                       Time sliced thinner than Time

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a yoctosecond   =           one septillionth of a second
a zeptosecond   =           one sextillionth of a second
an attosecond   =           one quintillionth of a second
a femtosecond  =           one quadrillionth of a second
a picosecond     =           one trillionth of a second
a nanosecond   =            one billionth of a second
a microsecond  =           one millionth of a second
a millisecond     =           one thousandth of a second

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ONE SECOND    =           9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding
                                         to the transition between the two hyperfine levels
                                         of the ground state of the cesium-133 atom
  
                                         don’t go

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      *

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Be here now we say        as if we could be anywhere else

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      *

but if we could live in the present
if we could be present in the present
an infinite string of moments moving forward
the past always a step behind pushing the future before us 
our never-ending haven                  our refuge

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      *

but Time builds on Time

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a kilosecond     =            16.7 minutes
a megasecond =            11.6 days
a gigasecond    =            32 years
a terascond      =            32,000 years
a petasecond   =            32 million years
a zetasecond    =           32 trillion years
a yottasecond   =          32 quadrillion years

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      *

We find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end

      *

yet if science is right            there was a beginning
though “proposed scenarios differ radically”

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              for example:

              the Hartle-Hawking initial state
             string landscape
             brane inflation
             string gas cosmology
            ekpyrotic universe

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“some of these are mutually compatible     while others are not”

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      *

she lifted me and cooed                sweet baby
he rubbed my head        and laughed

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Winston Churchill was alive        Jack Kerouac
Niels Bohr          Bette Davis       Red Grange
Sara Teasdale    Max Planck      Mina Loy
Sir Edmund Hillary          Werner Von Braun

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I laughed           he wiggled his finger in my belly           and I laughed

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       *

Wheel of Fortune         Wheel of Fate

The wheel of the quivering meat conception turns slowly in the void

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an ordinary kitchen clock                  domesticating time
 

       *

Consider the Earth's history as the old measure of the English yard,
the distance from the King's nose to the tip of his outstretched hand.
One stroke of a nail file on his middle finger erases human history.

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       *

whatever rolls towards us                  rolls away again
unless we find a way to stop it          but how can we do that

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in poetry           the way Sappho describes her desire
for someone at a banquet          2,500 years ago
(a little over 70 gigaseconds)     or Li Po                 drunk by the river
lifting his cup to the moon         recorded forever in exact words

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      *

but Hitachi         the Japanese company     has invented
a storage system that can “keep data unscathed for 100 million years”

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etched onto four layers of a thin sheet of quartz glass
it uses a laser to create dots that can be read by an optical microscope

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heat resistant     water resistant            chemical resistant
unaffected by radio waves               up to 100 million years

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     *

the mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time

​