Infinity's Illusion by Richard Farr

Author:Richard Farr [Farr, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781542048446
Publisher: Skyscape
Published: 2018-02-06T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 10

THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT

A catastrophe’s job is to come out of nowhere. A catastrophe’s job is to hit you when you least expect it, and then hit you again once you’re down. A catastrophe’s job is to be crueler and nastier than you’d bothered to imagine.

Everything is fine, everything is normal. Maybe there’s a tremor or a rumble, or a vague sense of unease in the air, but it’s not something you much notice, or attach any meaning to, because after all it’s an ordinary Wednesday morning and hey, everything is fine, everything is normal. Then, too quickly for you to draw breath, much less shout a warning or plan a retreat, comes the unforgiving plunge from light into darkness, from warmth into agonizing cold, from the mild boredom of the everyday into paralyzing terror.

Wars and earthquakes.

Economic crises and plagues.

The overnight rise of the Nazis, in the most civilized nation on Earth, and the overnight collapse of the Greenland ice cap, decades before the models predicted it.

The slip-and-fall from your bike—right in front of a speeding car.

Rosko Eisler’s parents becoming cold and odd and withdrawn, openly reading Anabasis and saying, “We just want to understand what’s going on, that’s all.” And then one day not being there: no note, not a word of farewell to their only child, just the red book with its promise of infinity, open on the kitchen table right next to the half-finished toast and the house keys.

The French mathematician René Thom was fascinated by this idea that normality could end without first giving people a decent warning—that Alice could just fall down the rabbit hole. He came up with an elegant model, catastrophe theory, described by a smooth plane with two key features. There’s a flattish area, with an imperceptibly subtle downward slope. And there’s a point at which the angle of the slope unexpectedly and rapidly increases, so that all in a moment the curve becomes steep, then vertical, then curls back under itself, forming an overhanging ledge. This is the ledge from which ordinary life, mouth open in surprise, hurtles to its death.

The funny thing about Thom’s graph is that there isn’t any identifiable point of no return, no line on the ground, no Rubicon. The curve is there from the beginning, and it continues to change shape in a perfectly smooth way. But the rate of curvature is accelerating, and the rate of acceleration is accelerating, and the mind can’t keep up with that. So we’ll let the historians of the future waste their time in futile debate over whether the decisive moment in our civilization’s rupturing was the simultaneous disappearance of more than six hundred people from three different towns in Portugal; or the riot in Nairobi, at which half a million Seraphim marched and thousands were slaughtered with automatic weapons by panicked police; or the Mauna Loa event, which—apart from everything else—revealed the split between the official Seraphim leadership and the many, like Amira

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