You Want A Physicist To Speak At Your Funeral
You want a physicist to speak at your
funeral. You want the physicist to talk to your grieving family about the
conservation of energy, so they will understand that your energy has not
died. You want the physicist to remind your sobbing mother about the
first law of thermodynamics; that no energy gets created in the universe,
and none is destroyed. You want your mother to know that all your energy,
every vibration, every Btu of heat, every wave of every particle that was
her beloved child remains with her in this world. You want the physicist
to tell your weeping father that amid energies of the cosmos, you gave as
good as you got.
And at one point you'd hope that the physicist would
step down from the pulpit and walk to your brokenhearted spouse there in
the pew and tell him/her that all the photons that ever bounced off your
face, all the particles whose paths were interrupted by your smile, by
the touch of your hair, hundreds of trillions of particles, have raced
off like children, their ways forever changed by you. And as your widow
rocks in the arms of a loving family, may the physicist let him/her know
that all the photons that bounced from you were gathered in the particle
detectors that are her/his eyes, that those photons created within
her/him constellations of electromagnetically charged neurons whose
energy will go on forever.
And the physicist will remind the
congregation of how much of all our energy is given off as heat. There
may be a few fanning themselves with their programs as he says it. And he
will tell them that the warmth that flowed through you in life is still
here, still part of all that we are, even as we who mourn continue the
heat of our own lives.
And you'll want the physicist to explain to those
who loved you that they need not have faith; indeed, they should not have
faith. Let them know that they can measure, that scientists have measured
precisely the conservation of energy and found it accurate, verifiable
and consistent across space and time. You can hope your family will
examine the evidence and satisfy themselves that the science is sound and
that they'll be comforted to know your energy's still around. According
to the law of the conservation of energy, not a bit of you is gone;
you're just less orderly.
Aaron Freeman
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