Category: The Stones Cry Out

Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing

This is the first essay in a series I call The Stones Cry Out, about the universe, life, literacy, and technology. I’ve been writing notes for this series for a decade. With the help of AI, I can finally transform them into essays. I start at the beginning — the very beginning. This essay explores the origins of the universe, the nature of energy and entropy, and the strange beauty of being alive in a world that is always falling apart.

We are thrown into existence. One moment, we simply are. We find ourselves here—breathing, thinking, caught in a web of relationships and sensations—without ever consenting to the fact. It is a mystery so profound that even our best explanations feel like poetry disguised as science.

The question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” is perhaps the most ancient and abiding of all questions. And the idea of pure nothingness—no time, no space, no awareness—is nearly impossible to grasp. We can speak of it, but only from the inside-out, as beings immersed in somethingness. Every time we reach for the void, we find thoughts there waiting.

Maybe our universe began with a thought—someone else’s. Or maybe every thought we have births a universe of its own. What we know for certain is this: we wake into the middle of things. From this middle, we begin to ask.

From Singularity to Expansion

The scientific account begins with the singularity—a point of infinite density and heat from which all things expanded in the Big Bang. A moment of unfathomable compression gives way to cooling, structure, and time. The universe is still expanding, still cooling. So are we.

But even singularities rest on something. Physics describes what happens after the bang, not before. No system is exempt from conditions. There is always a prior.

We live in a cosmos coded with constraints: the laws of gravity, electromagnetism, and the nuclear forces. These root parameters—this Logos, to borrow an old word—govern the transformation of energy into structure. From the dance of galaxies to the shape of your hand, it’s all conditional. It’s all in code.

Everything Is Energy

At the root of all form lies energy. E = mc², the old equation, tells us that matter is condensed energy. But what is energy? Physicists define it functionally: the capacity to do work. That is, what energy does, not what it is.

Philosophers go deeper. Energy is being. Is-ness. Everything that exists, exists as a form of energy. And every energetic form—particle or person—has some experience of being itself. The rock has no thoughts, but it has mass, temperature, location. Something it is like to be that rock.

This is the root of consciousness—not thought, but presence. Being is awareness. Awareness is being. That may be the oldest truth, hiding in plain sight.

Entropy: The Shape of Change

The universe moves. But it doesn’t move aimlessly. It unwinds.

The second law of thermodynamics tells us that entropy always increases in an isolated system. Order decays. Structures collapse. Everything tends toward equilibrium—a state where nothing more can happen. No more work. No more story.

We tend to mourn entropy as loss, but without it, there would be no change. No sensation, no life. Entropy makes time. It makes texture. It makes the possibility of experience.

There is beauty in the breakdown. One structure falls, another rises. Change ripples outward, and inside these waves, we find meaning. We call it story.

Eros and the Sensuous Universe

What animates this change is not just collapse but feeling. The universe, in its deepest movements, is erotic—not in the narrow sense of lust, but in the wide, yearning sense of longing, motion, responsiveness.

There is Logos—the code. And there is Eros—the pulse. One provides order; the other, life. Eros is Yin to Logos’s Yang. It is the reason the universe is not just a spinning clock but a sensuous field of relation.

We sense change because we are made of change. Our skin, our thoughts, our memories—they all flow. Life is the awareness of motion. And motion is Eros in action.

Time and Story

From the inside, entropy is experienced as time. Not the time of clocks, but the time of becoming—what philosophers call lived time.

Time is not a thing; it’s a pattern in energy. A series of structural transformations. One moment dissolves, the next arises. This wave of change is not reversible. It runs in one direction only.

We inhabit this wave, and we narrate it. That narration is story. Story is how we organize entropy into meaning. But the cosmos itself doesn’t need the narrative. It just moves.

Eventually, all systems wind down. Without new energy from outside, structures dissolve. This is not a failure; it’s the nature of the game. Even stars burn out. Even gods.

Precious, Not Sacred

Life appears anti-entropic at first. It builds order. But this is only possible because life borrows energy—steals it, really—from its surroundings. We consume sunlight, food, attention, resources. We metabolize energy into structure for a while, but the price is always collapse—of cells, of ecosystems, of civilizations.

This is why life is precious but not sacred. There are no exemptions. There are no perfect sustainability machines. Every act of living costs something. Every breath is borrowed.

And yet—what a wonder to be part of this great burning, this bright unraveling, this sensuous becoming.