The following passage is a speculative story about the last days of a great civilization.
At the peak of their glory, the engineers of this civilization worked on entire star systems, dismantling planets and asteroids to construct an immense interstellar empire. But as the universe began to die and the last of the stars went out, the engineers hunted for a final place to wait out eternity. They embarked on their last great feat of engineering around a lost and lonely black hole, using demolished worlds as raw materials to construct a shell to completely enclose the darkness. Within this thin shell, barely withstanding the gravitational grip of their savior, they eked out their last days.
The story is built on the scientific idea of Einstein's theory of relativity, which shook up our understanding of time and space.
The Origins of Space
In the mid-60s, Galileo published his seminal work "Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems" which described the life of a sailor in a windowless cabin. Galileo was later found guilty of heresy for his heliocentric view of the cosmos. Isaac Newton was born a year later in England, and within a few decades of Galileo's downfall, two of Europe's greatest minds were arguing about the nature of space.
The first theory of relativity had been born, but the work was banned and would not be removed from the church's index of forbidden books until 1835.
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The Feud of Newton and Leibniz
The feud between Newton and Leibniz began when Leibniz published his work first, and Newton claimed that he had stolen his ideas. As president of the Royal Society at the time, Newton set up a committee to investigate the dispute. The committee found in favor of Newton, and this animosity carried over to their second disagreement over space and time. Newton believed that space and time were a universal absolute, a rigid stage on which motion was played out, and both would exist in a universe devoid of matter to experience any motion.
To argue his point, Newton asked us to think about a bucket of water. If the bucket sits at rest, the surface of the water would be flat and level. But if we spin the water, its surface becomes curved. Newton asked, just what is the water spinning with respect to? He claimed that the acceleration of the spin was relative to an absolute space, something separate from the object.
Leibniz, on the other hand, said space and time only had meaning in the relative locations of objects. Space in an empty universe would make no sense, and to describe the properties of objects, Leibniz said space and time were essential in defining their meaning, but to say space in an empty universe simply made no meaning.
The Nature of Time
The nature of time occupied the minds of many ancient thinkers. In ancient Greece and Hindu philosophy, time was seen as cyclical from creation to destruction over four billion years, but its true origin remained elusive. Unlike space, time is clearly a different beast. We cannot, for example, freely travel through time. Time has a direction, a distinct past and a coming future.
To understand time fully, we first have to think about horses and steam engines. The coming of the industrial revolution presented humanity with a problem. The true origin of time remained elusive, but it was born out of the conundrum that thermodynamics was born. Maxwell understood the implications of the laws of thermodynamics and introduced a tiny demon who could sense each and every atom in the gas to create a more ordered state of hot and cold gas. Maxwell's demon can turn around atoms, directing slow atoms to one side and fast to the other.
Maxwell has created a world of chaos in the universe, and the universe is now a constantly dying universe heading for inevitable heat death. The final stages of the universe will be the end to the universe's first stars going into a state of universal rest and death. The universe is becoming a constant state of rest and life, and we are now the last stages of our own universe. We need to have a complete phase of life. We believe we'll be the last, and we can't have a final phase in this universe.
