a brief history of big physics

Physics used to be simple: the universe was eternal, static and predictable...
but there were dark clouds on the horizon.

First there was uncertainty, evidence of decay. Lack of conservation.
Then all became relative. Transmutable, interchangable, in a revolutionary way.

There was sudden change, lack of predictability.
A statistical world. Only identical mass aggregates mattered.
Some gathered collectively, others became exclusive. There were hints of underlying degeneracies.

Evidence was found that things were falling apart, despite noble attempts to maintain our world stationary.
First hints of potential ultimate irrevocable collapse. Death of stars.

After an interlude, nuclear reactions were seen to be critical.
Some tried to hold on to and salvage the empire of stasis and eternal expansion, but most focused on sudden beginning in the finite past. The focus was on whether eventual collapse was inevitable, or whether expansion was eternal.

Symmetries were broken, more conservation laws were overthrown, unification of attraction, repulsion and decay. Talk of revolution, new strangeness, truth and beauty. Opposites were brought to head-on collisions and identities shattered as we tried to gather underlying truths about existence from the debris, and more and more energy was brought to the destructive probing of our foundations.

New stronger forces came to prominence. Questions of colour were confronted and the ties the bind us together explored, with hints of future revolution.
Our hot past was finally confronted and analysed.

New generations came to the forefront.
Inflation dominated our thoughts. It was realised that there was much more to the universe than we had previously thought from our narrow perspective.
Normal matter was seen to be a minority in a world dominated by dark forces.

Convention was overhrown. Censorship confronted. Singularity was shown to be part of our world, while hopes for grand unity grew.
Young punks and hip new talent explored extra dimensions and started the enormous increase in our landscape of possibilities, even as we focused on a more anthropic world and sought and found new places to wander among the stars.

Discrepancies in our world view grew, as some came to see the universe like a giant high definition television screen, a projection of our existence underpinned by our digital world, finite yet unexplored.
We began to wonder where all this information went, is it truly preserved forever, or is it destroyed by our essential singularity as existence evaporates.

Our dimensions grew, in number and size; warped and twisted, folded and wrapped.
It was demonstrated we might be encompassed by simple rules, and that while the universe might be infinite and infinitely larger than we realised, in all dimensions, not only was our normal existence dominated by the dark sector, but that it didn't matter.
There was dark energy determining our fate and things were accelerating out of control.

The youth of today seem to think it is all a big game, something imagined. As if we were but the pawns of a huge, ruthless, flawed alien intelligence.

Our universe expands relentlessly, infinite, with a hint of an unsuspected axis of evil, but what we can see remains finite as our existence is diluted away in colder emptier loneliness the horizon shrinking as our universe expands and that all pervasive dark energy dominates all that matters.
On the horizon there are hints of rebirth, cycling, and the promise we can do it all over again in some unimaginable distant future.