...And We Will Have Snow

What Newt Said

They were on the moon.

That is to say, their drones were.

But it was so close to being the same thing as not to matter.

On his bed in Houston, Newt was holding Sedna, but his visual input was from the drone, giving him the perception of a lunar location.

Gazing upon Earth with its jewel-like presence prominent among the vast spread of stars, Newt felt his passion for space swell in his breast. Sedna was sharing in his passion, and conveying her own similar passion intimately. After basking in this exquisite sensation for a while, Newt's analytic mind began expanding on the meaning of it, what the universe was trying to tell him. He started sharing these thoughts with Sedna, semi-verbally.

"Passion is directed energy," he said.

"Conventional physics presumes things about energy that are not strictly true. The idea for example that it cannot be created or destroyed, only changed in form. But those forms are macro scale phenomena. On the scale of the quantum foam, passions erupt spontaneously, as oppositely directed energies which balance each other and so do not add to the zero sum."

There was a long pause, Newt still entranced by the small immensity of Earth on the Moon's horizon. Then he continued.

"Such eruptions are not simply equal and opposite pairs. They may come in clouds of energized particles of various types. So long as the sum remains zero, the actions are allowed.

"Energies originate with direction, and interacting energies can produce changes of direction, resulting in swirling vortexes that may stabilize in the form of particles, which in turn aggregate into larger masses, eventually forming planets and galaxies. All ultimately derived from the quantum nothing. The infinitesimal begets the infinite, and from nothing comes not just something, but everything.

"The everything may still sum to zero in some absolute sense, but the magnitude of it all is indescribably infinite."

Another pause. Sedna felt his thoughts evolving and said nothing.

"People are creatures of passion. We collect and direct energy. Life is all about passion, isn't it? The smallest living thing, even the smallest particle, has passion in this sense. Even a photon, a particle of light, of energy, may be said to have passion, direction, to be alive in this way.

"A thing that is passionless would be dead. But can anything really be dead in this sense?

"We say of energy that it cannot be created or destroyed. But it can acquire and change direction, alter its form.

"In our universe, the vast material universe, there are two dominant forms of energy, gravitational and photonic. Gravitational energy is unidirectional in a sense; it's all directed inward. It's dedicated to growth, to the acquisition of mass, to the coalescence and increase of mass and gravity until the mass disappears into a black hole and only the gravity remains."

He was quiet for a while, then he went on.

"The main action of gravity is to convert itself into photonic energy, the energy of directed motion. When there are two or more competing sources of gravitational energy, they can, through the interactions of their individual potential energies, exchange energy among them in such a way as to create a stable system in which some of the energy is converted to and remains kinetic. This we might call a gravitational resonance phenomenon. The direction of the kinetics, the motion, changes in such a way that it feeds back on itself and creates a stable pattern, an orbit." Sedna was watching the pictures that formed in Newt's mind as he spoke.

"Photonic energy demonstrates a similar phenomenon, in which it assembles low mass particles into stable atoms. These atoms of course coalesce around atomic nuclei, which are assembled from more primitive particles, particles that have their origins in very high energy conditions in which quantum effects are dominant and otherwise low probability events can spontaneously occur. These too can result from gravitational coalescences, the massive ones we call stars.

"The history of our universe seems to begin with a high energy event produced by primitive passions that resulted in a vast dispersal of the two simplest atoms, hydrogen and helium. It was from this dispersal that the passionate coalescence of suns was born, which in turn resulted in the production and dispersal of more complex atoms, another self-resonant process that still continues."

Sedna felt his mind drifting through the eons.

"From this dispersal of complex atoms arose new suns with planets, such as ours. This gave rise to the next evolution, conditions conducive to the production of molecules, more and more complex ones, until another passion arose, another self-resonance that we call life.

"Planetary conditions changed, until the stage was set for a new passion to evolve, the passion for the most primitive forms of life to combine into more and more complex forms, resulting eventually in, well, us.

"We can't claim to be the most successful of all life forms. The dinosaurs, for example, had a much longer run than we have had so far. But we can claim with some justification to have developed far more sophisticated passions than any other. Who else can claim to know the passions of a Buddha, a Christ, a Michelangelo, a Beethoven, a Van Gogh, an Einstein? Who else can claim to have mastered fire, farming, electricity, moving pictures, computers, cell phones? Who else has conceived and then carried through on the notion of traveling into space?

"We are a life form that has taken passion to a new level. Each of us has the capacity to develop a passion that has never been known before, and to follow its direction wherever it may lead.

"It may be said that we are the most complex and sophisticated product and producer of directed energy, of passion, that has ever evolved, at least on this planet. As far as we know, we are the leaders, the standard-bearers in the forward charge of passion. Should we not all strive to live up to that potential?"

Newt rolled toward Sedna and drew her close. She felt there was a lewd comment about standard-bearers that could be made at that moment, but she refrained.