probability forced us to exist exactly as we are. Only the timing was in question.”

“I have to think about that. It sounds logical but it’s weird,” I said.

“Think about this,” he continued. “As we speak, engineers are building the Internet to link every part of the world in much the same way as a fetus develops a central nervous system. Virtually no one questions the desirability of the Internet. It seems that humans are born with the instinct to create it and embrace it. The instinct of beavers is to build dams; the instinct of humans is to build communication systems.”

“I don’t think instinct is making us build the Internet. I think people are trying to make money off it. It’s just capitalism,” I replied.

“Capitalism is only part of it,” he countered. “In the 1990s investors threw money at any Internet company that asked for it. Economics went out the window. Rationality can’t explain our obsession with the Internet. The need to build the Internet comes from something inside us, something programmed, something we can’t resist.”

He was right about the Internet being somewhat irrational. I wasn’t going to win that debate and this was not a place to jump in. He had a lot more to say.

“Humanity is developing a sort of global eyesight as millions of video cameras on satellites, desktops, and street corners are connected to the Internet. In your lifetime it will be possible to see almost anything on the planet from any computer. And society’s intelligence is merging over the Internet, creating, in effect, a global mind that can do vastly more than any individual mind. Eventually everything that is known by one person will be available to all. A decision can be made by the collective mind of humanity and instantly communicated to the body of society.

“In the distant future, humans will learn to control the weather, to manipulate DNA, and to build whole new worlds out of raw matter. There is no logical limit to how much our collective power will grow. A billion years from now, if a visitor from another dimension observed humanity, he might perceive it to be one large entity with a consciousness and purpose, and not a collection of relatively uninteresting individuals.”

“Are you saying we’re evolving into God?”

“I’m saying we’re the building blocks of God, in the early stages of reassembling.”

“I think I’d know it if we were part of an omnipotent being,” I said.

“Would you? Your skin cells are not aware that they are part of a human being. Skin cells are not equipped for that knowledge. They are equipped to do what they do and nothing more. Likewise, if we humans—and all the plants and animals and dirt and rocks—were components of God, would we have the capacity to know it?”

“So, you’re saying God blew himself to bits—I guess that was the Big Bang—and now he’s piecing himself back together?” I asked.

“He is discovering the answer to his only question.”

“Does God have consciousness yet? Does he know he’s reassembling himself?”

“He does. Otherwise you could not have asked the question, and I could not have answered.”

“If the universe is nothing but dust and probability, how does anything happen?” I asked. “How do you explain gravity and motion? Why doesn’t everything stay exactly where it is?”

“I can answer those questions by answering other questions first,” he said.

“Okay. Whatever works.”

“Science is based on assumptions. Scientists assume that electricity will behave the same tomorrow as today. They assume that the laws of physics that apply on Earth will apply on other planets. Usually the assumptions are right, or close enough to be useful.

“But sometimes assumptions lead us down the wrong path. For example, we assume time is continuous—meaning that between any two moments of time, no matter how brief, is more time. But if that’s true, then a minute would last forever because it would contain an infinite number of smaller time slices, and infinity means you never run out.”

“That’s an old mind trick I learned about in school,” I said. “I think it’s called Zeno’s Paradox, after some old Greek guy who thought it up first.”

“And what is the solution?” he asked.

“The solution is that each of the infinite slices of time are infinitely small, so the math works out. You can have continuous time without a minute lasting an eternity.”

“Yes, the math does work out. And minutes don’t seem to take forever, so we assume Zeno’s Paradox is not really a paradox at all. Unfortunately, the solution is wrong. Infinity is a useful tool for math, but it is only a concept. It is not a feature of our physical reality.”

“I thought the universe was infinitely large,” I replied.

“Most scientists agree that the universe is big, but finite.”

“That doesn’t make sense. What if I took a rocket to the edge of the universe, then I kept going. Couldn’t I keep going forever? Where would I be if not in the universe?”

“You are always part of the universe, by definition. So when your rocket goes beyond the current boundary, the boundary moves with you. You become the outer edge for that direction. But the universe is still a specific size, not infinite.”

“Okay, the universe itself might be finite, but all the stuff around it, the nothingness, that’s infinite, right?” I asked.

“It is meaningless to say you have an infinite supply of nothing.”

“Yeah, I guess so. But let’s get back to the subject,” I said. “How do you explain Zeno’s Paradox?”

“Imagine that everything in existence disappears and then reappears. How much time expires while everything is gone?”

“How should I know? You’re the one making up the example. How much?”

“No time passes. It can’t because time is a human concept of how things change compared to other things. If everything in the universe disappears, nothing exists to change compared to other things, so there is no time.”

“What if everything disappears except for me and my wristwatch?” I asked.

“Then you would experience the passing of time in relation to yourself and to your watch. And when the rest of the universe reappeared you could check on how much time had passed according to your watch. But the people in the rest of the universe would have experienced no time while they were gone. To them, you instantly aged. Their time and your time were not the same because you experienced change and they did not. There is no universal time clock; time differs for every observer.”

“Okay, I think I get that. But how is any of this going to answer my original question about gravity and what makes things move?”

“Have you ever seen a graph of something called a probability distribution?” he asked.

“Yes. It has a bunch of dots on it. The places with the most dots are where there’s the greatest probability,” I said, pleased to remember something from my statistics classes.

“The universe looks a lot like a probability graph. The heaviest concentrations of dots are the galaxies and planets, where the force of gravity seems the strongest. But gravity is not a tugging force. Gravity is the result of probability.”

“You lost me.”

“Reality has a pulse, a rhythm, for lack of better words. God’s dust disappears on one beat and reappears on the next in a new position based on probability. If a bit of God-dust disappears near a large mass, say a planet, then probability will cause it to pop back into existence nearer to the planet on the next beat. Probability is highest when you are near massive objects. Or to put it another way, mass is the physical expression of probability.”

“I think I understand that, sort of,” I lied.

“If you observed God-dust that was near the Earth it would look like it was being sucked toward the planet. But there is no movement across space in the sense that we understand it. The dust is continuously disappearing in one place and appearing in another, with each new location being nearer the Earth.”