SERIOUSLY OFF TOPIC! ->
"Perhaps your writing about what MIGHT have been was programmed into the grand unfoldment of the Cosmos in those first billion trillionths of a second after the Big Bang" - Coalport
True.
"any luck you'll be able to take it all back during the Big Crunch!"
I have extreme doubts about the "big crunch"! - It looks a lot more probable that it will be a "big fizzle" - as in, all matter and energy becoming dispersed over such massive distances (by "massive" I am talking about incomprehensible - our present universe less than the "size" of an atom compared to its future coverage - when it even starts to become "dissipated" - gravitational and thermal effects diminishing and entropy increasing to its maximal, until at some point it effectively no longer exists .. and extremely long slow "fizzling out" 10000.. fill several notebooks with zeros.. billion years from now ) that particles have no effect on each other - time and space effectively dissipating into the void.... perhaps re-appearing as the quantum froth which bubbles in and out of nothingness in some new universe, as we see quantum froth doing in our universe. * (this is just one of my crazy ideas - no scientific backing for it at all, LOL) Whatever mechanisms brought this universe into play probably remain, capable of bringing other universes into being - and if this process is eternal, then some time in the "future" we will be talking to each other here - writing the same rubbish, making the same mistakes, blissfully unaware that we have been here an eternal number of times before!
- Which, to me, is a desperate idea - The only "hope" is that in some different universes there will be a different matrix of causal determinants - that in most universes I wont be here, even if TW is, LOL , and that in some universes I wont make the same mistakes - and that in some universes those who never stood a chance in this one will have a better life........ That, over eternity, everything will be "in balance" and "just".
For all we know, this might even be happening now - If there are multiple universes with different matrices of causal determinants existing simultaniously, everything might be "in balance" now.
I sometimes wonder if the above gives Stephen Hawkins the "hope" which helps him to carry on dispite his crippling disability - I know that he fully subscribes to the idea of determinism, and is no stranger to the ideas of multiple universes and the like - The realisation that, even though inaccessible, other universes where one has a differen hand dealt to one may (and probably do / will) exist , probably takes the edge off the desperation which might otherwise overwhelm one.
Fred.