I have good news for you. Everything is going to be all right. I mean that absolutely everything is going to be all right.

If there is a quarrel it will be settled. If you have lost a friend or loved one you will get that one back. Whatever you miss, you will have as they say abundantly. And I mean that literally, quite materially, and do not ask you to buy into some religious conviction of mine or abandon any conviction of your own. You do not have to believe me or even to understand me, although I invite you to. And the good news is that this material and social expectation is not the best of it.

The best news I can only guess at and hint. The material good fortune - there I feel on more solid ground. I will try to explain.

There was this man named Albert Einstein. Not everything he thought and said was right, but he made a number or remarkable contributions to science. Among them is the General Theory of Relativity. The theory has been challenged but seems sound. According to this theory, one of three things must be true:

1. There is some mysterious force in the universe, some sort of anti-gravity that has never been observed or tamed. Einstein at one time believed this to be true; later he doubted it.
2. The universe is expanding. Most scientists commonly believe this.
3. The universe is collapsing. I believe this.

At lest one of these three things must be true.

The mysterious force idea was introduced, discarded and is making a comeback. It will require massive evidence before I take it seriously.

The universe looks like it is expanding, and most scientists believe that it is actually doing just what it looks like it is doing. That is their job. They look at the universe and try to understand what they see. Mentally stepping outside of the universe and looking back is more difficult. Some people are blessed with an instinct that asks, "What does this look like?" The rest of us try to manage to get along knowing and thinking about only how other people and things impress us.

If you step out of the universe, so to speak, you will notice that "the universe is expanding" and "the universe is collapsing" are very similar. In fact, if the OUTSIDE of the universe has no preferred direction of time, then the two statements are identical. One need simply change the assumed direction of time to turn either statement into the other.

Imagine you are on a train. On the next track is another train. The windows of the other train begin to move slowly. It may take you just a moment to decide whether it is your own train or the other that is moving. An inhabitant of a universe, us, would to a first approximation not know whether the universe was growing or shrinking; the two would look the same.

Of course from our vantage point within the universe, we can tell the difference between the past and the future; they are different. We can know what the past contains with far greater certainty than we can know a comparable distance into the future. Now I will call the future we always call the future the "commonly sensed" future and the normal idea of time the "commonly sensed direction of time." From our assumed outside vantage point, we would have a "properly sensed future" and a "properly sensed direction of time." So the question boils down to: is the commonly sensed direction the properly sensed direction?

Our subjective notion, the future is what hasn't happened yet, is not a sufficient guide. The reason for that is that what we call the future is the direction in which the universe is getting larger. We would expect that direction of time to be indeterminate, to be impossible to know with present information. After all, as a city grows, as it gains more telephones, it needs a longer telephone number to reach each phone. Similarly, as the universe gets larger, it takes more information to locate each bit of matter within that universe.

There are some things that do not change in the same fashion. Electromagnetic radiation loses energy and is less well localized in a larger universe. Being less well localized, it takes less information to define its position. This just makes up for the fact that it is located in a larger universe. The universe cools some as it expands. Stars loose kinetic energy as they get farther from each other, but at the same time the gain an identical amount of potential energy.

Potential energy is what the roller coaster has at the top of a slope; at the bottom of the slope, potential energy has been converted to kinetic energy, which is converted back into potential energy as the roller coaster climbs the next slope.

One of the standard ways of speaking in science is to say that all potential energy is negative. One speaks of the difference between two levels of potential energy, but actual zero potential energy is when two objects are infinitely far apart.

Well and good, but there is still a fall in kinetic energy and an equal rise in potential energy as two stars or systems of stars separate.

So for most things, the expanding universe is in a kind of energy and information balance. But in the location of hard objects, there is an imbalance. It takes more information (which like mass is a form of energy) to locate objects with mass in a larger universe. So of course we don't know the commonly sensed future. It is beyond any calculation, so long as our information is limited to the universe at the present time.

Since our sense of time is a result of the ongoing change in size of the universe, it provides us no information about the direction of that change were we to view it somehow from outside, where there is no progressive size change and thus no progressive time.

We commonly think of space as being defined by things called "dimensions." The dimensions of a room are height, width and depth. And really that is it. There are just those three. I know of now way other than counting to come up with the number three. It just happens that way.

The universe has three dimensions and it is expanding or collapsing symmetrically. Measurements in the general direction of the North Star show the exact same rate of change as measurements in the direction of Orion's Belt. I know of no particular reason from main stream science that this should be true, but it is.

Also, time is symmetrical. Time along the North Star axis is going just at the same speed as time along the Orion's Belt axis.

There used to be way watchmakers would verify the reliability of a pocket watch. When they thought the watch was going all right, the watch would be wound and left on its back for a period of time. If it kept good time in that position, it would be turned on its face for a while. Then it would be held upside down. They used to record how many positions the watch was tested in. Of course they were testing for friction within the works of the watch. It was assumed that time itself was moving at the same rate in all directions. This was true, but no reason has ever been offered - except that I say it is because the universe is changing size at the same rate in all directions.

From our presumed vantage point outside the universe, these rather arbitrary assumptions are not expected to hold. There might be any number of dimensions. Space along any of those dimensions might be increasing or decreasing at any rate at all except zero.

Imagine our universe the size of a pinpoint. Each of our three dimensions would then have a total length that would barely be visible. If the universe were static, which of course is impossible barring an unknown force, you could then cross the whole universe in a vanishingly small moment. We would say that the universe was "highly curved" along each of its three dimensions.

Step outside the universe. In the OUT THERE are perhaps many dimensions, and many may be so highly curved as to be negligible. Others are expanding and others contracting at varying speeds. Toss an electron into that mess and it will carom back and forth in time weaving an incredibly intricate web and visible many times in any one small region, sometimes seeming positively charged and sometimes negatively depending on which direction you assign to time for the sake of your observation.

That is not to say that things are random OUT THERE. In fact, general relativity still holds.

According to Kepler, the planets move around the sun in a fashion such that a given planet sweeps out a roughly triangular area in any short period of time. And for that planet, the area is the same at any time in its orbit. Thus it moves fast when it is closer to the sun and slow when it is farther away.

Newton described the phenomenon by saying that there was a FORCE called gravity and that objects are attracted to each other by a force that is proportional to the mass of each in inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. The descriptions of Kepler and Newton are mathematically indistinguishable. Newton's force idea is a bit more general and a bit easier to visualize.

Einstein proposed that matter warps space, causing a curvature of the space. The objects we touch each day do not warp space a lot, of course. Einstein's warping of space is very close to Newton's force, but not exactly the same. Einstein's curved space is more general than Newton's force, working on light for instance, and a whole lot harder to visualize.

Electrons have a little mass. A lot of them would have substantial mass. In the great OUT THERE from which we look back at the universe, of course, the same electron can appear many times in a small bit of space at the same time. Also many protons can appear or one may appear many times. Together they can make neutrons and together they all make ordinary matter. Enough ordinary matter can have enough mass to produce a lot of curvature of space.

So the whole thing is a closed system. Matter is there in abundance, assuming a little bit of matter initially, because space is curved in such complexity. Space is curved because of abundant matter. This state is what we would call "chaos." Ordinary predictability and order are not present. Still it is not a matter of utterly random states; general relativity must still hold. And of course it might not be protons and electrons; there might be some more basic particle, a quark or something, that is actually bouncing around in the complex space of chaos.

Of course envisioning this state of chaos does not explain why it should have ever existed. Where are there dimensions at all? Why is there matter at all? Why is there anything? I'm sorry, I can't help you with that one. But assuming the tiniest bit of matter and at least three dimensions, chaos builds itself. It is hard for me to reduce the requirements below that.

There are religions and philosophies that start out with some sort of Demi-Urge, which is a sort of amorphous spiritual thing that is the fact of reality wanting to come into being or something like that. The Urge then gave us a bit of stuff and a bit of place. I find the Urge itself to call for so much explanation that it doesn't help me; it only makes things spooky and complicated.

And I assure you things are going to get plenty spooky and complicated as it is.

On the other hand, I do not discount this Urge. If you want it, you are welcome to it.

Each atom in our ordinary universe consists of a nucleus, which occupies a very small space, and a cloud of electrons, that are partly localized according to some very complex rules. The nucleus has a positive charge and the electrons a negative charge.

The negative charge of the electrons is attracted to the positive charge of the nucleus. Do not think of the electrons as moving around like planets. Any time a charged particle is accelerated, energy is released in the form of an electromagnetic wave. Such waves are things like light, infrared, radio waves, x-rays and a few others. The laws describing electromagnetic radiation have been well known for over a hundred years.

The nucleus consists of protons and usually neutrons. The positive charge of the protons should make them repel each other and every nucleus bigger than hydrogen, which usually is just a proton, should fly apart. The fact that nuclei do not fly apart is due to two forces, a "strong binding force" and a "weak binding force." The weak binding force is involved in certain forms of radioactive decay.

So far, so good. What has this to do with chaos?

The problem is that according to the best modern work, there are certain circumstances where the weak binding force and electromagnetic radiation are expressions of the same force. And what is worse, it seems that the relationship between the two does not have to be what it is. They say the two forces came into their current relationship at some point when the universe, our universe, was exceedingly small.

If that is the case, then there is no reason to expect that the weak binding force and electromagnetic radiation will be the same as they are now. In which case matter as we know it would not exist. Or would usually not exist. The laws of nature, other than the general theory of relativity, would be variable.

I do not, in fact, think that is the case. I will return to this point later. I do admit that it is a difficulty.

So assuming constant laws of nature in chaos, although very peculiar geometry with things changing size and time running every which way, what might we see?

We might see things collapsing under the force of gravity. Perhaps things would collapse along some dimensions and expand along others, rather like a water balloon being run over by a car.

The thing we might see that would interest us most would be to see a three dimensional black hole form that was about eight billion light years across and contained essentially all matter and no anti-mater.

A black hole is a collection of mater so massive and so dense that light cannot escape from it. We usually think of a black hole as being very dense indeed. If you took a stack of ordinary bricks the size of the sun, the pressure very far below the surface would be enough to destroy the bricks. If you kept adding bricks, after adding the suns weight a few more times the pressure would be enough to crush atoms and the center of the brick pile would be a huge mass of neutrons. Add enough more bricks and the neutrons themselves implode. They collapse down to a single point called a "singularity."

Light from the singularity would be so strongly pulled in that it could never escape. In fact, light from any where near the singularity could never escape. At a certain distance from the singularity, there is a point, a spherical surface, such that anything deeper is unable to release light that will ever escape, while anything less deep can release light. This level is called the "event horizon."

So there are two ways to look at the size of the black hole. The singularity is vanishingly small, and all matter is drawn inexorably into it. The event horizon is a sphere, which can be of substantial size, depending only on the mass within it. The more the mass, the bigger the event horizon.

Since things can fall into a black hole but never come out, the event horizon can only get bigger and bigger.

So take our black hole made of bricks. Imagine a point on the event horizon. Now double the mass of the black hole, stuffing it all within the event horizon. The event horizon moves outward. How far?

Lacking the general relativity equations, we will just use Newton. The force of gravity is proportional to mass, so at our original point after we have doubled the mass, we have doubled the force of gravity. If we go outward to a distance that is twice as far from the singularity, the force of gravity drops to one quarter; Newton says that force in inversely proportional to the square of the distance. But the distance has doubled, so the energy it took to get to the new point, twice the distance from the center, is doubled. In other words, double the mass and you double the size of the event horizon. The singularity, of course, does not get bigger.

But while the size of the event horizon increases in proportion to the mass, the volume of the event horizon increases as the cube of the diameter. A box that measures two feet by two feet by two feet has eight times as much room as a box that measures one foot by one foot by one foot.

So the average density of a black hole decreases as its event horizon gets larger. The black hole we see form in chaos eight billion light years across has the density, more or less, of our present universe.

Now chaos, OUT THERE, has no preferred direction of time. But this black hole we have just imagined does have a preferred direction. It can collapse but it can never expand. That is to say the matter inside it can never get out. Of course the event horizon can grow as more and more things fall into it.

However, there is no reason at all that this elegantly symmetrical, almost miraculously free of antimatter, enormous, non-charged and non spinning black hole will coincidentally be the biggest black hole around. The forces of chaos will eventually tear it apart. That will probably happen long after the initial matter in the black hole has been crushed into a singularity.

So it would seem right to say that in "proper time" as viewed from an outside that itself lacked time, that the black hole is collapsing.

Which means that our third possibility must be the truth. The universe is collapsing but commonly sensed time is the reverse of properly sensed time.

For most purposes, it does not matter which direction time is moving in. But notice that the event horizon does form at some moment. From our perspective inside, the event horizon must vanish at some moment in the future. This is not to be confused with the event horizon being torn apart by the forces of chaos we just mentioned. That will happen on the other side of the singularity from us. It will happen before the big bang, not just in the past but before time as we commonly sense it began.

No the event horizon will just pop like a bubble.

Then we shall see chaos. I think ordinary matter will be able to exist. It is enough of a stretch excluding anti matter. But as far as we can tell the vast stretches of observable deep sky contain perfectly ordinary matter. The notion that is can exist in unlimited variety but our black hole all contains exactly one kind: that is too much of a stretch.

We cannot see chaos now. Of course all sorts of stuff including visual images are falling in after us. But from our perspective of commonly sensed time, these things are all falling outwards, so that we cannot see them.

Fortunately, and perhaps as no coincidence, every religion I have ever heard of prepares us for such an eventuality. Let us run through a few.

Christianity, Zoroastrians and Islam come to mind at once. Each of these looks forward to a day when the world will be profoundly changed and God will establish a kingdom that will be good in every way. You may be skeptical, but if you doubt your God or savior is going to be there, you will have to explain why the promise, the reassurance was given before the problem was recognized.

Even now, and despite my own best efforts, essentially no one knows about time running backwards and the universe being a black hole from which we are escaping. No one dreads the implications. Yet a billion Christians and a billion Muslims and a fewer number of Zoroastrians are going happily about their business with the answer tucked away where they can readily get it out and think about it.

Modern Judaism is more difficult for me. My impression from "Fiddler on the Roof" is that you can say the same as you can for Christians. If I am wrong, may I be forgiven.

On the other hand, Old Testament Judaism, before the book of Isaiah, seems to me to be a lot closer kin to a tribal religion, as if to say, "We've got our god and he's better than yours."

Religion serves a lot of purposes. It addresses what you are. It gives you a rational for your behavior. It provides reassurance in the face of impending chaos. It should provide an artistic tradition, a support group, a clue as to who might be an acceptable mate, a circle of friends and sometimes some charity. The tribal religions address all of these issues excellently except chaos. I think if you just drop the "and he's better than yours" part, tribal religions need little in the way of improvement.

There are religious traditions in which one fears reincarnation. One meditates in order to learn to suppress one's own personality and become one with everything else. For my own taste, that is turning down the adventure of eternity, but I think there is no question that it would work.

Look at it this way. After a lifetime spent in constant meditation and training, one dies in peace only to be tossed into chaos and find oneself alive again in a very challenging environment. It one consistently takes the position, "No, I will not be part of that. I will not respond to that." I think one's tranquility might indeed transcend chaos itself.

There are religions. In which one expects to come back as a human or even an animal. Well, if an electron can carom through space and time, why not a human? Perhaps OUT THERE in chaos, there were many copies of all of us that fell in. Yes, in that case there might have been lives and lives to come.

Animals? Could you come back as an animal? Sorry, you wouldn't actually be coming back. But you or some expression of you might have been an animal. After all, there is very little real DNA difference between living things. Somehow a human might be genetically engineered into an animal. Think of it; the while blood cells in your circulation are effectively little amoebas. Amoebas eat then divide. White blood cells do their last division before starting to eat. There is not really much other difference. Yet the white blood cell has exactly your own DNA.

And animals are little ham actors. They overact at everything. Even insects get into the business of living and dying, eating and fearing with charming enthusiasm. I frequently walk in a nearby park. There are other walkers and there are ducks. I know the other walkers are capable of more than the ducks are capable of. But if you actually watch what they are doing, the walkers are just walking, while the ducks are establishing very intense, joyous relationships with each other and with some of the humans.

I don't care. If you want to believe you have lived as an animal, I am not about to say it is difficult to believe.

A religious tradition that may extend far back in time, mostly unrecorded, and seem to have a contemporary resurgence is the Goddess. The belief that within nature there is a sort of abiding nurturing spirit, rather feminine in its outlines, that assures that things grow, that things are taken care of, that everything gets special attention. And inherent in this is the feeling that nature cycles forever, nothing ever gained or lost, always beautiful, always with good color coordination.

At first, that would seem like a non-starter of an idea. After all, if the world is a temporary sort of think and the universe is going to end some day, where is that eternal cycling? But really, within the context of chaos and assuming that within that context we have any power or initiative, then what could be a better attitude? Progress is great, but progress for all eternity? Wider roads? Smaller, faster computers? For eternity? The Goddess idea would wear rather will, I think.

Honoring the Goddess is often referred to as "Pagan." I fear that is doing violence to the term. For me the word pagan has usually meant the worship of the male dominated, regimented, hierarchical, warlike, rational, fatalistic, punishing, gloomy pantheon of Indo-European gods. Those gods are little worshipped in Europe at the present time, so I do not feel I need to explain how they fit it with the idea of the universe as a black hole just about to dump us out into chaos, but they do.

The clearest example is the Viking notion of Valhalla. When a brave warrior dies, spirits take his soul to the abode of the gods, where he spend the rest of time drinking all night and fighting all day. And then at the end of time, the heroes join the gods and march into battle against the forces of chaos. And chaos wins.

It is all very Teutonic, very gloomy and very Indo-European. And of course it just happens to come very close to the truth.

There is yet another religious element we need to consider. There is widespread in the world the notion that there are evil supernatural powers.

First comes the bad news. Yes, there could be evil powers.

Consider this. In normally sensed time, stars are rushing away from us, things run down and wear out, people grow old, energy levels fall, organization deteriorates and so forth. In Properly sensed time, the stars are rushing inwards, people are getting younger, energy levels are rising and organization is increasing.

We can well imagine that in the normally sensed future, before the bubble bursts, stars might burn out, the universe cool and darken and human life no longer be possible. So if we look to the properly sensed future, normally sensed past, stars light up, the universe, warms and brightens and … some form of life now impossible might become dominant.

Indeed, there were dinosaurs, and how they managed to live with their huge bulks is still a matter of interest. But what might have lived that might not have left fossils. Perhaps there was some abstract form, what we would call devils or false gods, far subtler than we are ourselves. We might well find ourselves at their mercy if we all awaken from centuries of slumber at the same time.

On the other hand, these would not be supernatural creatures. They would not be any more immortal than we are. After all the most of them seem to be gone just at the moment. Mostly they survive as questionable old stories. We are not talking things of ultimate power, but simply struggling beings such as ourselves. Besides, they might not exist at all.

So how did we get into this? How did we chance to take the trip from chaos into this collapsing black hole? God in some form or another seems to have had a hand. Lacking a conscious creator, we still might postulate an Urge. Perhaps this island in the midst of chaos was only a coincidence, but I doubt it. It seems too clever.

Because look at what we gain. In this universe there is a difference between right and wrong. Hurting is not helping. Creating is not destroying. Love is not hate.

Yet in chaos, absent any preferred direction of time, there is no difference. Wounding and healing are exactly the same. It is just a matter of which direction you chose to be your time.

So we live in a moral universe. That is not to say the universe is always fair. That is to say that good and bad exist and we can all understand them.

What a wonderful invention that was! With all of space and time some One invented moral consequence. Everyone learns it. Some of us live longer and maybe happier than others live. But we all understand hurt. We all understand cold and hunger and fear. And we all understand their opposites.

I suppose one could imagine we had been tossed in here to get rid of us, but in chaos even our perfect black hole cannot survive forever. I suppose one could imagine we were tossed in here as a form of punishment. I find it hard to believe that a Mind that could encompass good and evil without an example to look at, that such a mind would fail to let us know what we are being punished for.

No, we are all volunteers. We must have signed up for this life thing knowing full well that there would be bad moments. But we signed up, we joined the great adventure so that we could learn at first hand just what moral consequence is.

I think that makes us very noble. Even those of us who have done terrible things are noble. I think we all have a right to be very proud.

So the good news is that when the forces that now control the universe are relaxed, whatever we want in terms of friends, comforts and experiences should be our for some effort. Armed with the experience of having been alive, we will know something about purpose and will. Of whatever forces might be out there, few will match us for that.

And the better news is that long with understanding purpose we will have learned to understand moral relationships. I think we will do well.

And perhaps the best, and I can only get a glimmer of this myself, is that we were creatures who were willing to make the sacrifice, endure the pain and fear of life in order to learn these things.