It is possible that other writers have started their books by writing the last chapter first but I do not know of any personally. So for the limited purposes of this post, I am going to pretend that I am the only one who might have done it.
The book in question is my upcoming one ‘What does Jupiter really do?’ which, as the description on its cover says, is about “A lifelong and futile quest to get a handle on this damn universe.” For some reason, I found it much easier to write the final chapter first because it affords me the luxury of off-the-cuff writing that does not require any research.
It is more like a philosophical essay on the meaning or the purpose of the universe. I am not saying I found the meaning or the purpose because I was not looking for either. Having engaged with the theme since the age of 13, I have now spent 45 years meditating over it. You will have to read the book to find out what my conclusions about this damn universe are if one can offer conclusions about a seemingly open-ended thermodynamic macroscopic system. There is now a whole new field in physics called quantum thermodynamics that looks at the rules that govern heat and energy at the atomic level. That makes the scope of my quest even more difficult.
Every time I see the emergence of a new field of study in physics, my optimism about ever being able to make some sense out of the universe personally dims considerably. In the interest of clarity, in my book I am not aiming to offer explanations that make sense to anyone other than me. It is strictly my quest based on having read great ideas in physics for over four decades. One enduring quote that is always in my mind came from the Nobel Prize winning physicist Steven Weinberg who says so memorably in his 1976 book ‘The First Three Minutes’: “The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy. ” I read that in 1979/80 when I was 18/19.
In a sense, that observation has been one of the reasons for me to write this rather freewheeling book about the universe. It is my way to elevate my life a little above the level of farce and give it some of the grace of tragedy.
My default response to the universe is to conclude that there is no particular reason to understand the fundamentals of the universe because there is no entity that would tell you that you have finally got to the essence of it all. It is not necessary that we comprehend the universe in order to live in it but it would be intellectually satisfying to know that one at least tried. The human intellectual realm is so minuscule when it comes to traversing even the smallest area of the universe. Unless we become an interstellar civilization, we will continue to speculate about the universe from the surface of Earth. When you consider that out of some 300,000 years that Homo sapiens have been around, perhaps some form of science has existed only for a few thousand years and modern physics for a barely 130 years, in a galactic neighborhood that is 4.6 billion years old you get some measure of the scale.
The best way to get a grasp on the universe for ordinary mortals is to deliberately not think in terms of what might have existed in the early universe—the first three minutes as it were—but what we see and experience in our immediate surrounding. There is no reason to believe that what we see right here on Earth is any less astonishing than what we might find on an exoplanet billions of light years away. Over the weekend, I was watching the BBC’s Planet Earth series yet again and was completely disoriented by the creatures that exist in deep ocean. The same question plagued me as the title of the book but in a variant. “What do these deep ocean creatures really do?” That question can be raised in an infinite number of variants across the universe without seriously hoping to fine one final explanation.
I return to my longstanding view that we all carry own personal universes. As I wrote on November 13, 2014, “I have long been convinced that we all lead a life of reasonable inferences. Over the millennia, humans have accumulated a set of large but finite number of inferences. These inferences often fit the observable reality or at any rate, what we call real. One of my own current favorite views about the universe is that we all carry our own little universes in our heads. When my universe converges with yours, we have a happy, friendly exchange. When our universes diverge, we have an argument that may be often unpleasant and, in some cases, even violent.”