The Active Side of Infinity

A man staring at his equations

said that the universe had a beginning.

There had been an explosion, he said.

A bang of bangs, and the universe was born.

And it is expanding, he said.

He had even calculated the length of its life:

ten billion revolutions of the of the earth around the sun.

The entire globe cheered;

They found his calculations to be science.

None thought that by proposing that the universe began,

the man had merely mirrored the syntax of his mother tongue;

a syntax which demands beginnings, like birth,

and developments, like maturation,

and ends, like death, as statements of fact.

The universe began,

and it is getting old, the man assured us,

and it will die, like all things die,

like he himself died after confirming mathematically

the syntax of his mother tongue.

- Anonymous