{"id":620,"date":"2012-05-23T00:03:03","date_gmt":"2012-05-23T07:03:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chineseeinstein.wordpress.com\/?p=620"},"modified":"2012-05-23T00:03:03","modified_gmt":"2012-05-23T07:03:03","slug":"a-tree-falls-in-the-forest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/jason-fu.com\/blog\/a-tree-falls-in-the-forest\/","title":{"rendered":"A tree falls in the forest"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>I saw a homeless man sitting on in the park on my way to school the other day. In Seattle this isn\u2019t really an unusual occurrence. Homeless people are everywhere, and I usually don\u2019t take too much note of them, but this one in particular caught my attention. Nothing about him was particularly remarkable. He was clearly drunk, and seemed lost, or as lost as a person can be when they have nowhere to go. He looked no different than the hundreds of other bums that littered the streets of my city. But as I walked past him, I took a second to look at him. Something about his posture seemed elegant, almost dignified. It was hard to tell through the layers of filth and tattered clothing, but it seemed to me like this man was once a somebody.\u00a0 How he ended up drunk and sleeping in public parks, I\u2019ll never know.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>And then I did something I\u2019d normally never do: I walked up to him and introduced myself. He didn\u2019t seem to hear me at first, leaving me standing there looking like an idiot, but after a few seconds, he looked up at me. And then I saw something remarkable. For a split second, the drunken haze seemed to lift from his eyes.\u00a0 He seemed to have a moment of clarity, like he was seeing the world for the first time. <\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>\u201cHow did I get here?\u201d He asked me. <\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>\u201cI don\u2019t know\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>And then, just as quickly as it came, the moment passed, and he was staring blankly out into the distance again. After that, I hurried off, giving the encounter little thought. I was going to be late for school.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>\u00a0The End.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>The man probably died within the next few years. Sleeping half naked in parks and spending every waking hour drunk doesn\u2019t usually help prolong your life; homeless people tend not to live very long. In any case, I didn\u2019t bother to give it much thought. Like I said, incidents like this aren\u2019t uncommon in most major cities. These people are everywhere, and for the most part, they go ignored. Our stories intersected, and then went their separate ways, his ended shortly afterwards. And as far as I was concerned, that was it.<\/p>\n<p><em>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/em>But it wasn\u2019t it for him. They say that when you die, time slows down and your life flashes before your eyes, and I have to wonder what flashed in his mind in his final moments. Death is an adventure in and of itself, isn\u2019t it? I wonder if, in that brief moment when he realized where he was, he saw where he needed to go. I\u2019ll never know.<\/p>\n<p>When people talk about trees falling in the forest and no one being around to hear them, I often wonder if they really understand breadth of what that phrase is saying.\u00a0 As English novelist C.S. Lewis said, \u201cAt every tick of the clock, in every inhabited part of the world, an unimaginable richness and variety of \u201chistory\u201d falls off the world into total oblivion.\u201d How insane is that?<\/p>\n<p>Think of the famous Hubble Deep Field Image taken in 1995. I read somewhere that there are ~10,000 galaxies in that photo, and yet, more than 90% of the universe is empty space. And that picture only covers one thirteen-millionth of the night sky. That\u2019s not even a fraction that we can realistically visualize. If we took another picture slightly to the left of that one, we\u2019d be looking at another ~10,000 galaxies.<\/p>\n<p>Now according to Big Bang cosmology, the observable universe consists of the galaxies that we can only observe from, because light from those objects has had time to reach us since the Big Bang. With each passing year, as technology improves (and more light is able to reach us), we can see a little bit deeper into space. One theory estimates that if our observable universe (which is already mind-bogglingly large) was the size of a quarter, the universe beyond our vision us would be about the size of the Earth.<\/p>\n<p>The Hubble Ultra Deep Field Image took 400 orbits and 800 exposures to take. There are over ten thousand visible galaxies in it. It\u2019s impossibly big, and yet, in a cosmic context, it doesn\u2019t even register on the radar. That is ridiculous. Think of all of the grand celestial miracles that happen daily, the creation and destruction of planets, suns, entire galaxies being sucked into impossibly massive black holes, going completely unnoticed; as if they never happened at all.<\/p>\n<p>Even on our own Earth, in the darkest parts of our oceans or hidden deep in our rainforests, there are entire ecosystems that we\u2019ve never discovered. Entire species have evolved and gone extinct without our notice. The vast majority of what goes on in the universe, and even on our own Earth slips underneath the radar of human perception, little droplets in a vast ocean of history. And that\u2019s a scary thought.<\/p>\n<p>When people talk about a \u201cGod of the Gaps\u201d, they\u2019re usually referring to a type logical fallacy in which gaps in scientific knowledge are taken to be evidence or proof of God&#8217;s existence; i.e. there is a gap in understanding of some aspect of the natural world, therefore the cause must be supernatural. Seems rather disrespectful to an all-powerful creator God, no?<\/p>\n<p>But when I hear that phrase, I think of something entirely different. My God of the Gaps is a God who watches over the gaps in history that no one else can watch. The God of the Gaps is present at the smallest miracles, from cell division to tiny chemical reactions, to the vast explosions and celestial movements of bodies on the other side of the universe where no human could possibly observe. He\u2019s the one who hears the trees falling in the forest when no one is around to hear them, and he commits all these things to an infinite memory, catching everything missed by our limited human perception. And he\u2019s the God who set all of these things in motion.<\/p>\n<p>How comforting is it to know that nothing is ever really forgotten?<\/p>\n<p>-Grand Duke Gumdropious III<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I saw a homeless man sitting on in the park on my way to school the other day. In Seattle this isn\u2019t really an unusual occurrence. Homeless people are everywhere, and I usually don\u2019t take too much note of them, but this one in particular caught my attention. Nothing about him was particularly remarkable. 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