What time is it?

I am currently reading Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, as part of my Accounting Theory readings. Ironically, it is the only Accounting Theory reading I care to read because it has practically zero relevance to Accounting Theory – that’s why it’s so darn interesting.

I had to put it down after 3 chapters because it has given me an immense headache, and I was dizzy with excitement, like a child who first learned that plants photosynthesize. Why, in Stephen Hawking’s name, didn’t any Physics teacher recommend this book to us? I would probably have done a Physics degree instead. It’s like, why didn’t I listen to Isaac Stern’s recordings of Mozart when I was learning music? Well, too late. Now I can only hope to find a book that explains Ito’s Lemma as clearly as Stephen Hawking discusses Einstein’s general theory of relativity. (Or maybe, I should aim to write one! )

I was reading in Coffee Bean. As I put down my book with a spinning head and looked around at people walking around in the commercialized man-made heaven, I began feeling extremely extremely small. I felt like an ant, no, smaller, like the bacteria that lives in the guts of an ant. And the expensive coffee I was sipping is merely digested bread crumbs.

Watching the mundaneness of people shopping around feels like watching ants shift bread crumbs. The humanities and social sciences (which I’m usually more inclined to read than the hard sciences) may be interesting, but now they seem little more significant than the most intricate organization of ant colonies.

Like humans as “higher beings” take little interest in the crumbling of ant hills, actually, who gives a damn if AIG and Citigroup fall? It’s like, minuscule in the greater scheme of things. However big, they are merely two of the many companies on Earth, and Earth is only one of the planets in the solar system, and the solar system is one of many in the galaxy, and Milky Way is just one of the many galaxies in the universe, and the observable universe is probably just a small part of god knows what. So yeah, AIG may fall, the economy may collapse, men may go into extinction after destroying Earth, but the universe will still exist, and it doesn’t even matter if the expanding universe eventually collapses on itself because man will most likely not live to see it happen.

While most people were fretting over World War One, Einstein published his theory of relativity and showed that there is no such thing as absolute time, which means identical clocks in different locations measure time differently! Then what does it mean to discount expected returns to obtain option price when no objective measure of time is possible? At seemingly the same point in time, my option price can be higher than yours! What time value of money?

Apparently, bodies like Earth aren’t actually moving in curved orbits. They are moving in straight lines in the four-dimensional space-time, but appear to be moving in curved lines in our three-dimensional view of the world because space-time is curved. That means light doesn’t actually appear to travel in a straight line in space. Now which science teacher made me memorize the fact that light always travels in a straight line? Oh yeah, the same one who told me Pluto’s a planet.

Conversely, of course, I can maintain my worldly belief that whatever happens to the universe doesn’t matter also precisely because man will never live to see its collapse (if it ever does). What’s of immediate concern to us, is of course whether or not we can cling onto the guts of the ant to prevent being passed out, not whether the ant hill crumbles. After all, if AIG does collapse, my world (as I know it) would probably end and it doesn’t matter anymore whether space-time is warped or not.

I enjoy books that screw with my mind.