Loose stools, rings on the table, similar universe as before. summer, cicadas, shower an hour or so ago, some drips, heat of the day fading
Adam was already a few drinks in when Marcin said it.
“I still think you’re smuggling time in through the back door,” Marcin said, staring into his glass like it might answer back. “You keep talking about configurations like they’re waiting in a queue.”
Adam snorted. “They’re not waiting. That’s the point. They’re all there. Between zero and one. Whole interval, everything observable exists there, just not equally likely at the same moment.”
“That’s a maths answer,” Marcin said. “Reality’s messier.”
“Reality is mess,” Adam said. “But constrained mess. Every configuration that can exist is allowed. Doesn’t mean it’ll show up before the pub closes. Or before the Sun burns out, f*cking stinker today eh.
Marcin leaned back. “So nothing’s ever new?”
“Nothing’s ontologically new,” Adam said. “Experientially new? All the time. First time the system falls into a configuration with enough coherence to stick around, you call it ‘new’. But it was always admissible.”
Marcin frowned. “That sounds like cheating.”
“Nah, means tech isn’t “new” either. Marconi didn’t invent radio waves. He tripped over a frequency that was already there. Same with iPhones, just rocks arranged to resonate with electromagnetic fields we finally learned to tickle properly, Probability redistributed.”
Anna turned up then, coat half on, half off, eyes already tired. “Redistributed what?”
“Everything,” Adam said. “Energy. Configurations. Hope. Incomes.”
“Ah,” Anna said. “Not so much these days with incomes, the capitalists are sucking up everything, cost of living, cost og f*cking Elon’s fucking new boat of spaceship or whatever. Of course everything is going to cost more while the rich inflate the value of debt.”
Marcin waved her into the argument. “Yeh, f*ck them, too much is too much, should cap incomes at a few mil. the rest goes to public good. Its all come from the same place, the universe never invents anything, people never invest anything, just eventually trip over states not yet realised”
Anna thought about that. “That’s basically evolution,” she said. “Nothing new, just things that didn’t cease immediately”.
“Exactly,” Adam said. “Selection is just delayed erasure.”
Isobel arrived with drinks no one remembered ordering. “You lot look like entropy with opinions,” she said.
Marcin pointed at Adam. “Ask him whether time loops.”
Isobel raised an eyebrow. “Does it?”
Adam shrugged. “Depends what you mean by loop. If you mean does the universe revisit states — statistically, maybe. If you mean does experience loop — no chance. Records accumulate. You can’t un-write scars.”
“But if the system’s ergodic,” Marcin said, “given infinite time it explores all accessible states. That’s looping, isn’t it?”
“Only if matter stays coherent long enough,” Adam said. “Ergodicity assumes the path is consistent. Energy wandering freely. No sinks. No phase changes. No heat death.”
Anna nodded. “Ergodic arguments always forget that the table melts.”
“Exactly,” Adam said. “Ergodic without matter is just energy sloshing around phase space. Once structure forms, ergodicity breaks. Once structure dissolves, it breaks again.”
Isobel sipped her drink. “So where does heat fit in, professor?”
Adam smiled. “Heat’s not a thing. It’s an effect. A measure of how loose the system is. How much space the system has to wander in.”
Marcin jumped on that. “So heat doesn’t do anything.”
“It lets things happen,” Adam said. “Faster. Or at all. But it never decides what happens. Heat widens the door. It doesn’t choose who walks through.”
Anna frowned. “Then why does everything end up dead?”
“What the f’ck, everything changes, nothing dies. Wandering without bias eventually smooths everything out,” Adam said. “No gradients. No constraints. No records that matter. Just motion and a record, what do you want on your permanent record?”
Isobel tilted her head. “Heat death.”
“Yeah,” Adam said. “Not a bang. Not even silence. Just nothing left to distinguish one state from another.”
Marcin stared into his glass again. “We certaintly wouldn’t want the record showing I was a paedophile, or a a*hole to women, or an arms dealer. F’cking sad c*unts that end their lives in the wrong side of the ledger, had one f*cking chance and chose to be c*nts. Probability that they think all realisable states have already been realised at least once?”
Adam shook his head. “Vanishingly small. Not because time’s short. Because retention is. Most states blink into existence and vanish before they count as having happened. The record keeps track and whether it ever gets played is really irrelevant, it is nonetheless.”
Anna sighed. “That’s depressing.”
Adam shrugged. “Not really, maybe if you confuse novelty with meaning. Meaning comes from the fact that some configurations hang on. Briefly. Against the tide.”
Isobel raised her glass. “To hanging on.”
They clinked.
Outside, the streetlights hummed, converting electricity into warmth, light bleeding gently into the night, entropy paid for in small, ordinary ways.
Ceteris Paribus 