Scientists, and many other people, have pondered this question. This article - (PDF) Graviton-Photon Interaction and Mass Generation: A Vector-Tensor-Scalar Geometry Approach (researchgate.net) - speaks of retarded and advanced gravitational and electromagnetic waves which respectively travel forwards and back in time, cancelling each other and entangling particles throughout the universe (the physicist Richard Feynman loved advanced waves). It also says particles are thus united into one place in space-time and the idea of their existing in two spots, or times, at once is an outlook resulting from perception of all things and events as distinct and separate. As page 12 of the article puts it, “An alternative interpretation might see these particles unified into a singular entity by the action of advanced and retarded waves, leading to a concept we might call “unipositionality”, drawing from the Latin ’unus’ meaning one.”

If we accept the articles’ propositions, all of space-time plus its contents would be a single entity – a step towards a Unified Field Theory, a Theory of Everything or Quantum Gravity - and the equation 1+1=2 (and presumably every other equation, no matter how complex) appears at first glance to be obviously impossible. Yet those same equations do describe the world and universe remarkably accurately. Is there another explanation besides the apparent one – someday there will be a human civilization that can build their mathematics into the creation, structure, and functioning of life and the cosmos. Emotion may well declare this an absurdity and we might retreat to things like quantum fluctuation or spontaneous creation from nothing. Logically – using Einstein’s nonlinear, curved time added to limitless advance of human potential through the eons – the absurdity is plausible.

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