Protons and Electrons
In the beginning, the UNIVERSE consisted of two shapes: PROTONS and ELECTRONS. I’m not yelling at you; I just want you to remember certain things. Electrons were tiny and wanted nothing more than to get with the big protons. The protons wanted to feel the same way, but they were too hot and couldn’t commit to any one electron.
It’s important to remember that protons and electrons didn’t really want anything. They couldn’t think or feel anything; it’s just more fun to speak of them as if they weren’t merely dumb unthinking shapes.
The Atom
After a few hundred thousand years the protons saw that they were getting on in age and that the time to settle down had come. They finally gave in and formed long term relationships with electrons. A proton in a stable relationship with an electron was called an ATOM. The attraction between protons and electrons was called ELECTROMAGNETISM. There was an electromagnetic taboo: opposites attracted, like repelled like. If a proton was near an electron, it would go ahead and snatch it up. If a proton was near another proton, they would politely pretend they didn’t see one another and move in opposite directions. As far as our nubile shapes were concerned, their existence was purely guided by electromagnetism.
Dot density indicates the strength of the electromagnetic field. Electromagnetism was stronger at closer distances.
Lumpy clouds
There was a second force called GRAVITY. The gravitational force clocked in at a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth the strength of electromagnetism. By all accounts, gravity appeared to be a stupid and useless force that really might as well not have existed. At least, that is what you would think unless you kept a very close eye on the universe over the next few millions of years. The only thing that was special about gravity was that it was purely attractive.
Let us say we observe a little proton friend. He is just going about his business when he comes across another proton. Like a good boy, he is electromagnetically repulsed and so he runs away. In his flight, our little friend becomes lost and doesn’t know where to go. To his left, there is a small group of protons and electrons. To his right, there is a larger group. Where does our little friend go? Well according to electromagnetism, he is attracted to the electrons of either group, and repulsed by their protons. These forces cancel out, and electromagnetism is a wash overall. This leaves only the gravitational force to decide where our lost friend will go. Since gravity is purely attractive, and never repulsive, he is simply attracted to the larger group, since it contains more mass. Our friend has found his rightful place in the universe, and he slowly begins drifting towards the large mass.
This same principle guided the development of the universe over the next millions of years. Very slowly, the universe transformed from a roughly uniform distribution of particles into a collection of LUMPY CLOUDS. The lumpier the cloud, the better it could act as a unified mass to attract other particles to it. Thus lumpiness begat further lumpiness.
Stars
As time passed, these lumpy clouds became more tightly packed. The protons at the centre of these lumps had nowhere to go! Any direction they went, they found themselves running right into other protons, and that damned electromagnetic taboo prevented them from going any further. The walls kept closing in around them, packing them tighter and tighter together, squeezing them until they could barely move. It was then that the first interesting thing in the history of the universe happened.
Under the vice grip of gravitational pressure protons were forced to face one another directly in a way they had never done before and they finally saw their taboo for the nonsense it was. They found the edge of electromagnetic repulsion, and on this edge, a third force was discovered: the NUCLEAR force. The nuclear force was a special force that only applied to protons (sorry electrons).
Both forces got stronger at closer distances. The nuclear force was much stronger at very close distances, but it had a sharp drop-off. This meant that there was a threshold distance where the two forces were exactly equal.
Once two protons forged a nuclear bond, they created a kind of new atom that contained two protons. This new bond was 100 times stronger than electromagnetism. It would never ever be broken apart, not for the entire remainder of the universe. In forming the bond, the protons made each other’s lives so much easier that they were able to release bunch of energy that they had been holding onto for no good reason. The release felt wonderful for our two lovely protons, but it made things incredibly awkward for their neighbors. Already being under great gravitational pressure, this additional energy was just the thing to cause them to go over the edge and undergo a fusion reaction of their own. This resulted in a chain of explosive fusion reactions.
When you had lumps of protons big enough for these dazzling explosive fusion reactions to take place, they were referred to as STARS.
Bigger Atoms
Some stars were big enough to force multi-proton atoms to smush together additional times, but all stars eventually ran out of things which they could smush together. When this happened, the outward pressure that was previously being generated from the fusion explosions would disappear. This could result in stars collapsing very rapidly, creating explosive shockwaves, unprecedented amounts of pressure, and yet bigger atoms.
Big atoms were very special shapes. An atom consisting of 11 protons that were smushed together from a star was a very different thing from 11 protons that had not been smushed together.
At the time of these supernovae, these atoms were too stupid to understand the significance of this difference. However, it would have important consequences in a few billion years.
Each atom had a different name, depending on how many protons were inside it. Hydrogen had one proton, helium had two, boron had three, and so on.
Molecules
Before stars and bigger atoms, nothing all that interesting ever got built. You might have seen a few of the more enterprising atoms come together now and then to share an electron with a fellow atom, but such arrangements were transient and insignificant. Bigger atoms were cosmopolitan. They had seen the birth and death of a star. They had undergone a transformation, overcoming the electromagnetic taboo and discovering a deeper and more powerful force beyond it. They weren’t limited to simple bonds with one other atom. Instead they could form complex and stable structures where multiple big atoms bonded together to form a new kind of shape called a MOLECULE.
The most important big atom of all was CARBON. Carbon was an atom with fourteen protons. The thing about carbon was that it was very good at sticking to other atoms. It could stick to up to four other atoms. Carbon’s favorite thing was to stick to other carbons, who then in turn could also stick to other carbons, thus forming long branching chains. Other atoms would be allowed to mix in these chains here and there.
Because carbon was so important there was a shorthand for referring to it.
When a molecule with several carbons was drawn, the carbons were just drawn as points, connected by lines.
The thing on the right was a quicker way of drawing the thing on the left
Planets
There were even bigger atoms than carbon—silicon, aluminum, and so forth—and though they couldn’t form crazy branching chains like carbon could, they still had their purpose. When a bunch of these very big atoms came together, they formed dense rocky lumpy shapes called PLANETS. Unlike the explosive stars, these clumps were stable. They were so big and fat that they attracted the littler shapes that would float around the planet, forming a thing called an ATMOSPHERE. One such planet was called Earth.
Please note that the smile is merely artistic flavor. Earth was not smiling at this time. In fact, it was very sad and self-conscious about its weight.
Complex Molecules
Earth had something very special that enabled atoms like carbon to come together and form whacky shapes. That special something was called WATER. Water allowed big atoms to float around and touch one another in ways that they had never been touched before. This phenomenal new touching resulted in the creation of all sorts of new shapes. Some of these shapes were spectacularly stupid and good for nothing:
Sorry tetraethylmethane, you are a BAD shape.
Regardless of the bad shapes, Earth kept pumping out new shapes. These shapes were in competition. Some would be better at surviving the conditions of their environments, while others would quickly be broken apart. Some might be good at gathering up little components and building more of themselves, thus enabling them to proliferate their unique shapeliness. This can be seen as kind of a proto-life. Shapes evolved and increased in complexity, but only up to a limit. The environment was too harsh for anything extravagant to form. Something would have to happen if they were going to reach the next level of complexity.
Special Bubbles
The something special was BUBBLES. Rather, a specific type of bubble. To understand what made some bubbles special, one must understand that water was polar.
Water was a molecule that consisted of one oxygen atom and two hydrogen atoms. Each of the two hydrogens shared their electron with the oxygen. However, since oxygen contained many more protons than hydrogen, it pulled on the shared electrons more strongly. The electrons being pulled to one end of the molecule resulted in it having two distinct ‘poles’: a electron-surplus pole, and an electron-deficient pole. Thus water was polar.
Water.
If you gathered a bunch of happy little polar molecules and shook them up, they could all easily find a place where they fit in. Electron-deficient ends would snuggle up against electron-surplus ends, and they would form a tight-knit community where they could be perfect neighbors. The molecules could also move around easily since there were always suitable places for them to fit in.
In contrast to polar molecules, nonpolar molecules did not have significant differentials in the proton content of their constituent atoms. Electron sharing was equal.
Long carbon chains were examples of nonpolar molecules.
Now, if you were to mix polar molecules—say, water—and nonpolar molecules—say, long carbon chains—the egalitarian freedoms that were experienced when they were among their own kind were quickly forgotten. The polar molecules quickly realized it wasn’t so easy to exist next to large shapes with evenly distributed electron clouds. It didn’t matter which end they turned towards the nonpolar molecules, it was always awkward. Whenever they found one another, water would stick with its own kind. As water grouped up, empty space would be left behind within which the nonpolar molecules would reside. Being amongst their own kind, the nonpolar molecules would come to realize that they too experienced an attraction to their own kind. There was just something about the way two long carbon chains nestled up against one another that felt right.
Now we can think about special bubbles intelligently. Special bubbles formed when you had water and a whole bunch of nonpolar carbon chains arranged in a thin sheet. This sheet would then fold over onto itself. Have you seen ravioli? Yes, I imagine it was something like that, with the pressed ends becoming excised, leaving just a smooth bubble. The special bubble was stable because it was nonpolar; water couldn’t freely pass through it and destabilize it.
As a side note, clay may have been very important for binding carbon chains and allowing them to form the sheets that would then become bubbles. Some people (people were another shape, which I’ll explain later) like to say “Ah look, so life did come from the clay after all!”, while other people like to say “Shut up”.
Are you skeptical about the importance of the special bubbles? Well chew on this. The water in which the bubbles formed were full of all sorts of shapes. There were big shapes, small shapes, polar shapes, nonpolar shapes, little specks, big branching chains, and so on. When special bubbles formed, they would sometimes encapsulate a whole bunch of other shapes. No two bubbles would contain the exact same combination of shapes. Perhaps you can imagine that certain polar shapes might damage the integrity of the bubbles and cause them to dissolve. Let us not worry about details, but let us just accept that there were also shapes that could cause the bubble to split in two. Additionally, some shapes were capable of attracting little components that would come together and form copies of themselves. There would be bubbles that contained shapes that were both good at creating copies of themselves as well as increasing the bubble’s ability to split. Bubbles with these kinds of shapes would be able to essentially divide and create copies of themselves.
Bubbles were certainly much more complex shapes than the protons and electrons that we started with. Do you think that this meant that bubbles might have a will? That they were guiding their own destiny and becoming the best they could be? Of course not, they were simply larger structures composed of all the same stupid little shapes that we have already been talking about. They possessed no will.
Nucleotides and RNA
When bubbles split, the children they made were imperfect copies. Some copies would be better at reproducing and some would be worse. Naturally, over time, the bubble population of Earth would majorly consist of the best bubbles which had undergone innumerable divisions.
Eventually, the perfect bubble contents were stumbled upon. The contents of these bubbles were stackable shapes called NUCLEOTIDES.
Nucleotides were a type of molecule. Here’s a nucleotide:
The convoluted shape on the left will hereafter be referred to as ‘A’.
There were four nucleotides: ‘A’, ‘U’, ‘G’, and ‘C’. Similar to how carbon could stick to more carbon to form molecules, nucleotide molecules could also connect to other nucleotides. This allowed for yet another more convoluted way for shapes to form. When a bunch of nucleotides stuck together, this formed a chain called RNA. I could tell you what RNA stands for, but it wouldn’t mean anything to you, so we will just stick to RNA.
RNA can be represented by the sequence of nucleotides which it is comprised of. For example, the above RNA can be called AAUCACCGUA…
RNA is the universe’s sticky spaghetti. People like to say that nucleotides are code, and that RNA is a series of instructions. This is not the case. RNA is just a big chain of stupid carbony shapes. The interesting thing about RNA is that two identical sequences will end up forming very similar overall super-shapes. That is to say, RNA is a tangled mess, but the specific way that it is tangled will be determined by the nucleotide sequence. This is a complex demonstration of polarity: each nucleotide will have different electron distributions, which will in turn affect what it is attracted to. A segment of RNA that had a surplus of electrons would be perfectly happy to bend and twist in order to stick to distant segment that had a deficit of electrons. This is how the structure of RNA becomes so twisted and tangled.
By the same principle, different segments of RNA would be good at attracting different external floating molecules in the environment. As things attach to RNA, its electron distribution changes, and so its structure changes. As its structure changes, segments buried within the tangled spaghetti might become exposed, and so the overall ability of the RNA to attach to different things would then be altered. The capabilities of RNA were extremely complex, while essentially being predetermined by the nucleotide sequence.
Whereas the first bubbles were just a mishmash of shapes, now we had bubbles with a complex structure with seemingly infinite potential. Let us not quibble over what different specifically must have happened next (because who the fuck knows) but let us merely marvel at the endless potentialities available to our ancestor bubbles. As RNA sequences competed with one another, all sorts of wondrous innovations were inevitable.
Bacteria
Electrons bound to protons to make atoms, stars gave us more types of atoms, atoms bound to one another to make molecules, molecules bound to one another to make bubbles, and bubbles reoriented themselves to make RNA-containing bubbles which were called BACTERIA.
The essence of bacteria is that they trick energy into entering their bubble. The energy wants to escape and return to the universe, but the cell says, “No sir, you must first ride my wild ride.” The bacteria that put energy on wild rides that did nothing good died off. The bacteria that put energy on wild rides that made them better at creating copies proliferated. This is evolution. Do you think that evolution might not be all that different to all the other developmental stuff that had been going on, all the way back to protons and electrons? I don’t know. I don’t know a lot of things.
There would one day be a bacteria that contained a special shape that looked like this:
To understand why this shape was important, it is necessary to understand photons. Photons were even smaller than electrons. They were so small, in fact, that I couldn’t even begin to draw a cute little face on them. Photons were always bouncing around the world. These photons moved faster than anything. There aren’t many photons on Earth. That is, unless you happened to be in a part of the world that was directly under the sun, in which case there were very many photons indeed.
Here is what happens to that special shape once a photon smashed into it in just the right way:
Image source: the internet
Now it is just a matter of the cell also having something like a stupid strand of hair on its rear end which could be wagged only when it came in contact with the trans retinal. This bacteria will move about when there is light. If we assume there is more food available when there is light, then this little bugger will be more efficient than his dumb brethren who simply move around no matter the time of day. This means that this little bugger is the site of the first disaster of the universe: eyesight. Now the universe would be cursed to spend the rest of eternity looking at its own ugly self. Did this little bugger want to move around during the day, so as to partake in the more efficient feeding routine? Was it conscious? Could this be the site of the first decision in the history of the universe? Don’t be an idiot. The little bugger is just a shape; its existence is entirely guided by the laws of shapes. What would it even mean for it to make a decision?
Despite being unthinking unfeeling brainless morons, bacteria kept making little changes and got better at things. Little changes, however, do not exclusively mean little consequences. Don’t you idiots remember the discovery of fire? Don’t you remember the plow? The printing press? The whole thing about the quest for truths is that not all truths carry equal rewards.
Once upon a time there was a bacteria. It absorbed bacteria, and instead of eating it, it decided to make it a pet named Mitochondria. This allowed it to have 100,000 times more energy or something ridiculous like that. I cannot explain this arrangement, as I did not attend class on the day this was explained.
With its newfound energy surplus, the living creatures of the universe kept stumbling their way through incremental changes: tails, fuzz, solar energy processing and storage, chemical signaling, and so on, all the way up until they eventually arrived upon the invention of the mouth. The mouth was a special segment of the bubble that could be opened or closed. This provided living creatures with a single locus through which they could control what they consumed, rather than being hapless sponges within their environment. Shortly after the mouth, the universe invented the asshole. This may seem miraculous, but it was in fact the second great disaster of the universe. With the introduction of the asshole, living beings were one more step removed from the consequences of the waste that they spewed back into Mother Earth.
Human Beings
There may be a couple steps that I missed, but assholes and eyeballs pretty much get us to the formation of one of the stupidest shapes of all time. His name was Jacob Miller, and he wrote this story.
Jacob was a type of shape that had become very complex. It was called a human being. The human beings had some of the best sensory organs around. For instance, the eye ball. When a photon crashed into an eye ball, it would measure the speed at which the photon was oscillating as well as the direction that it came from. How can a collision hold that information about the photon? My textbook didn’t say. But anyway the eyeball was so good at this, that it could inform its human about the distance, shape, texture, and color of every single unobstructed surface that was in front of it. Whoa!
Because the planet that Jacob lived on had an atmosphere, there was another opportunity for sensory organs to gleam more information about the environment. This was done through organs called ears. Any time two objects touched each other, the little shapes of the atmosphere were repelled outward in a shockwave. This would create a pattern of repeating compressed and uncompressed air, called sound. Different types of collisions would produce different types of shockwaves, which the ear could measure.
There were other senses but who really cares. What’s more important is that human beings possessed a windy tubular shape called a brain. This brain housed a network of billions and billions of interconnected nodes.
They were so good at reading their environments, but they also had organs that transformed their environment and put messages in it so that others could read them. For instance, they could vibrate meaty throat strings together in order to create sound. The human beings developed a system for assigning meaning to different combinations of sounds called language. They could also communicate via photons. In front of the brain was a sheet of flesh and muscle called the face. By morphing their flesh sheet this way and that way, one could effectively reflect an array of photons that, when received by another human being, would say “hello, I am going to kill you”.
I will not kill you. Relax.
Half of the human beings had an inflatable stick called a penis, and they were called men. The other half were women, and they had a tunnel called a vagina. It might be tempting to think of the vagina as a second asshole, due to its placement, but it’s really more like a second mouth. Instead of ingesting smaller living creatures, it ingested a male’s DNA, smushed it together with its own, and then the lady’s body kept smashing little shapes into it until a new human being was created. This was called SEX. Sex felt really good because all of the successful living creatures that ever existed had sex and created little copies of themselves at some point. When you had sex, it was as if every single ancestor, going back to that bacteria with his pet Mitochondria, was looking down on you and saying “good job”. Human beings had discovered a loophole where two people could have sex while denying the union of their DNA, thus spitting in the face of their watchful ancestors. It still felt good though.
The reason Jacob was such an idiot was that while his peers were doing things like punching each other in the face and having sex, Jacob was telling people about shapes. “Look at my cute parakeet” a woman shape might say to Jacob. “That’s not a parakeet. That’s just a shape. You’re just a shape too. We aren’t talking right now, there’s just a bunch of shapes smashing around and transforming each other.” And so nobody liked Jacob. You may feel that now would be an appropriate time to ask the question: “If Jacob wants to be liked, why does he choose to behave this way?” You are a fool who is in love with stupid questions.
Collective Memory
Originally there weren’t so many human being shapes, and they spent most of their lives sticking to little groups of buddies and pals. One thing they were always fond of was flapping their mouth meat together and vibrating their throat strings in order to pass encoded information to other human beings. Meaty mouth flapping was so effective towards the goal of reproducing that the skill was improved generation over generation. This increased the ability for information to be spread throughout all humans. This made it much more favorable to be able to hold onto all this information, and so humans kept getting bigger brains.
This resulted in the universe’s third great disaster, known as COLLECTIVE MEMORY. The sum knowledge of all human beings was its own shape that transformed and adapted over time according to its own rules. It would gain bits that were beneficial to humanity’s survival and lose outdated bits. New human beings could access and learn from the collective memory, and quickly get caught up to speed. Convoluted bits would be summarized in neater explanations. Untruths would be removed. Nowadays, physically powerful human beings have a very tough time competing against dweebs that spend their whole lives filling their brains with the meat-flappings of yonder days. The knowledge one could acquire through studying was just too valuable. Did the collective memory of humanity want the dweebs to succeed? Was everything conscious? You idiot. You buffoon. This is the stupidest question yet. There will be no more stupid questions.
The whole problem with dweebs using collective memory is that the universe really wasn’t that complex. It was only a matter of a few thousand years under the rule of dweebs before pretty much everything was figured out. When challenged, a dweeb would respond with something like, “Have you read the works of Eratosthenes? Have you read the Principia Mathematica? Did you read about what they did to Hypatia? Have you cried while listening to Tchaikovsky? Have you cried while gazing upon Aivazovsky? Have you cried while reading Dostoevsky? Have you cried while watching Tarkovsky? Do you know who Democritus, Magnenus, Thompson, Planck, Curie, Rutherford, Einstein, Bohr, Schrodinger, Heseinberg, and Feynman are? Have you traveled the Visuddhimagga? Have you contemplated the śrīvatsa while practicing Nyungne? What’s your take on rationalism versus empiricism? Are you an aestheticist, or are you still stuck on pragmatism? Oh no. You’re not an objectivist, are you? Good lord. You jumped up ape. Do you even have a pedagogical framework? How can you hope to convince me of anything? Go read 30,000 books, then you may be allowed to have an opinion. Also, whatever happened to the neutron?” Laying on such a rebuke provides the dweeb with nearly unlimited social power and sexual partners.
This is a dweeb:
He spends a large amount of time holding a computer mouse, so his right shoulder is lowered. His right hip is raised. His right abdominals are larger than his left. His hands are all fucked from typing on debate forums all day. His head is very far forward and he has chronic upper back and neck pain. This is the human shape’s final form. Except maybe fatter. This is the final chapter in the universe’s book of shapes. I apologize.
The Universe
Once upon a time, the Universe got bored of being one single piece of nonexistence, so instead it cut itself up into a bajillion little shapes and smashed them into one another. The Universe then spent billions of years doing origami with itself. The origami became so convoluted that its most folded-over tendrils forgot that they were part of the whole and started building their own origami to try and model the thing that they already were.
This leads me to my final question. As per my previous promise, it will not be a stupid question. Universe, are you out of your fucking mind? Why are you eating yourself? Why are you hunting yourself? Why are you having sex with yourself? Why are you studying yourself? Why are you imprisoning yourself? Why are you envying yourself? Why are you torturing yourself? Why are you loving yourself? Why are you passing moral judgements on yourself? You buffoon. You stupid shape.
Peanut Gallery