The Questioner

The Questioner thought that time moves forward, but these days, she eerily feels that time moves backward. From the standpoint of her inner feelings, she struggles to understand why they say time is uniform. From D.C. to San Francisco, from the Carina Nebula to the Earth, time feels different. On this foggy shore, she has gone nowhere, unable to cross the transcendent bridge to the other side from where her wounded spirit heeds a beckoning call. 

Like Vedder’s pilgrim clothed in rags, she embarked on an arduous journey, hoping to hear the elusive Truth from the East to the West. Success seems uncertain, for skulls of past questioners are washed away on this shore, buried by the shifting sands of time. Undeterred, she persists. What matters, after all, is the process itself. While the pilgrim on the East Coast leans in to hear the Sphinx’s enigma, not a person is left on the West Coast to answer her riddle. The Sphinx has surrounded herself with shipwreck remnants, amid which dice are fatefully tossed into a Truth that cannot be no matter how much it is better defined. 

The Questioner follows the poets’ lead who live in dreams where signs and symbols are more real than words they hear and images they see in their waking hours. Since crossing the threshold, she lingers at the boundary. Immersed in the Quantum Forest, she loses track of time and meets a quantum Observer. Together, they witness time fleeing the house of everything to join Nothingness and the Quantum Universe in the infinite circle of the three Universals, imprinting itself in gravitational wave echoes. 

In the making of a universal symphony involving information resonance,  relic gravitational waves lie beneath the cosmic microwave background. Trembling waves date back to the breaking of spherical pressure waves transitioning asymmetrically. Gravity is the tie connecting with the visible matter through only very tiny interactions, if at all.  Fermions are musical notes that strengthen and amplify in the process.

In Barbour’s realm, expansion occurs simultaneously on either side of the Big Bang. The two futures in the two directions are independent. From the standpoint of the rhizomatic Nothingness,  however, no singular or Janus point exists. Across the Multiverse, time is local, seemingly evaporating like droplets. It lives in minds, suspended memories, and curved space. Whether quantized gravity or gravitized quanta, time unravels from the rhizomatic Nothingness. On a line interval flowing endlessly, compactified three-dimensional forms touch the trail of feelings while carrying within a lingering sense of absence at the juncture of Nothingness and Being. 

The Questioner asks, “If the universal organism reveals itself in plain sight where structures and objects enjoy a fragile taste of free will, so when does the planning occur?” The Observer answers, “A transformative process is hidden in multidimensional layers of the overlapped, intricate Multiverse.” He offered her a clue before parting ways: “Given the predictable arrival of pulsar radio signals, any delay or acceleration in the timeline of electromagnetic waves traveling through the cosmos is a telltale sign of the interrelation between time, gravity, and space.”

It remains difficult for the Questioner to entirely grasp the extent of the meaning of multidimensionality. She goes on to meet again the oddly balanced character who comes to life only to experience the fear of its collapse. Staring at its head, the Questioner ponders, “If Nothingness is a time domain, isn’t it akin to Timelessness?” The Juggler — as it is otherwise known — scratches its head and replies: “Timelessness is the feeling of eternity. By suggesting a simultaneity and unification of temporal moments, it characterizes time positively above the surface while the rhizomatic Nothingness as a time domain refers to the so-called imaginary time, layers of the Multiverse below the surface.” Delving deeper into the Truth, the Questioner wonders how to bring into light the shadowy time zones.

The Juggler’s head is filled with the hush of silence. In Nothingness, silence rules. Concepts of distance and length find no place. Their very mention is absent. How, then, could a sound so faint be whispered in its ear? Recalling an old manuscript from the East, the Questioner asks: “Where do sounds come from anyway? Nature, Being, or something else?”  In its heart, the Juggler dreads the collapse of its parts and responds: “While the sounds of the Universe surface over time, the hushing silence influences the quantum system, and in turn, the quantum system influences the hushing silence. When bound to mass and volume, the sounds of the Universe translate into frequencies. Entropy gauges the random changes in the symphony. Beauty is the qualitative property necessary for the Universe to feel its beat. With gravity, the symphony gains in amplitude, form, and texture.” 

Musicians and Poets who reached the land of dark sectors before she did gained a timeless knowledge of sounds, encouraging her to assimilate the subtleties of rhythm, frequency, amplitude, texture, and structure. The texture reveals layers of low-frequency waves originating from distant astrophysical sources and high-energy processes separated from her by eons. Sounds from afar appear random, in sequence, or changing. 

The Questioner continues her journey, three steps forward and two steps back. A roadblock obstructs her path. Since the arrow of time gets into things through the touch of gravity, if repulsive gravity is discounted, could it mean that antimatter — whether in atomic confines, undiscovered patches, or in exotic dimensions — isn’t going backward but shares our thermodynamic arrow in a symmetrically forward motion? If repulsive gravity is ruled out, does that suggest that there is only an irreversible series of events producing asymmetric outcomes?

In this realm of multidimensionality, past, present, and future weave a continuum paved with footprints seemingly pointing in one direction, even those of ubiquitous neutrinos and their counterparts throughout their lifetime. Arrows of perspectival time in all the many layers do not cease to exist even if they cease to be there. With a smile, the Juggler bids her farewell, stating: “Once and for all, on this shore, time comes first, but, in all truth, what is left of time passing?” 

She pulls her head above the surface and watches a fox crossing her path as it returns to the forest den, urging her to do the same. Words have formed a pit in which she drowns herself. At the pit’s base, she takes time to reassess each drop-like word, anchoring them one by one onto a makeshift ladder that she climbs to emerge into the sunlight. She remains not a bit tamed, unwilling to do as she is told by the fox. 

In the deceptive cycles of Nature, the Questioner takes stock of all things, realizing that, ultimately, no conditions or entities truly replicate themselves. They disperse across time and space, expelled as transcendent structures through shattered patterns. While entities — and their identities — diverge from each other, physical and non-physical traces blend, negating isolation. Outside the Questioner’s own line of sight, crisscrossed lines fade into a multidimensional whole from which the holistic Nature arises.

A bird singing leads her along a rocky path over the mountain toward the setting Sun. It is not that she wishes to orchestrate a symphony but to pursue the making of a melody that unravels within her quantum mind, guided by memories of an ancestral passage ringing louder and louder. Amid forms and lines, kindred spirits murmur in her ear: “Agency coexists with space, sentience with time, consciousness with gravity.”Wary of missteps, the Questioner follows the moonlit trail, sensing time through fingering sounds. By now, her mind has pushed the door of her cell, unchained by the four-dimensional boundaries. ​​​​​​​