When I was going to school, way back in the dark ages, matter was easily defined;  it was something that had mass and occupied space.  It could be quantified.  Weighed.  Measured.  Touched (if there was enough of it, and it wasn’t too hot or cold).  It had volume.  It existed in three states until I got to college the first time, then the schools were talking plasma.  It could be changed, but it existed in the same amounts at all times.  We were pretty sure we had a handle on matter.

That old, familiar image of the atom. This one was hanging out in PhotoBucket.

We didn’t.  By the time I went through college the second time (yeah, yeah… I never figured out what I wanted to be when I grew up), I had to re-take all those old undergraduate science classes because it was a whole new world.  Matter is a lot stranger, more dynamic, than originally thought.

The states of matter, the very strangeness of matter itself, works itself into thought proofs dealing with the eventual end (or not) of the universe.  A very (very) simplistic overview of the universe is that space and time exploded into being about 13.75 billion years ago in an event known popularly as “The Big Bang”.  Since the Big Bang the universe has been expanding out in all directions, and while the rate of expansion has varied, the average has shown a fairly constant rate of increase.  Finally, that the universe will eventually end in either a “Big Crunch”, or a dismal “Big Chill”.

I like Douglas Adams’ (author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) hypothesis; the universe will eventually end in an event known as “The Gnab Gib”.  A “gnab gib” event is the opposite of a “big bang” event.  Of course.

Diagram of the ergosphere around a rotating black hole, where the influence on nearby matter is expressed. Image by Messer Woland, some rights reserved.

Anyway; matter.  A good example of how our perceptions of the universe have changed would be antimatter.  The ideal of “negative” matter has been kicked around since at least the 1880′s as a staple of the vortex theory of gravity.  This particular model needed a fourth dimension from which originated the negative matter.  Now we know that antimatter doesn’t originate in another dimension, but is a state of ordinary matter.

As we learn more about the universe around us, we realize that very little is “ordinary” or commonplace.  It seems as though the unusual is the “ordinary”.  We know that as the universe expands outward, the inflation is accelerating instead of slowing down, as we expected…

…you know what?  Very little is quite what we expected, when you get right down to it.  It seems we have set our expectations very low.  There is more to consider in the commonplace than first imagined.  One facet of the action of the universe, i.e. its accelerating expansion, presents us with enough mystery to keep us here for a week.  Consider that not only is the universe expanding along its “borders” (if it could be said to have such a thing), it is also expanding within itself.  Faster and faster.

Given another decade or so, what is currently science fiction may very well be commonplace.  The ideal is both frightening and exhilarating, just like everything else in the universe.