In this creative short story, The Illusionists, Lacy Loar-Gruenler shares her account of how Kurt Gödel and Albert Einstein “murdered” time. Or did they?

The text is available at https://ibha.wildapricot.org/resources/Documents/Origins/Origins_X_04.pdf#page=3

Lacy Loar-Gruenler has worked as a newspaper journalist, editor, and corporate lawyer. She is a summa cum laude graduate of Villanova University, and currently is a graduate student in Harvard University’s program in Creative Writing and Literature. Her interest in Big History, including religious tradition, is grounded in her love for forward-thinking philosophers who have explored the human need to answer existential questions. She is working on a memoir about her years living in France.

The video also features “Gravity’s Law” composed by Sam Guarnaccia and performed by the Main Line Symphony Orchestra. This piece is part of the Emergent Universe Oratorio, available at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHx0AeNv1KqTv4bpv3nw7Smi0Yeb3NKK9 The story is narrated by Lowell Gustafson.

This is a video produced by the International Big History Association (IBHA) at https://bighistory.org/

How surely gravity’s law,
Strong as an ocean current,
Takes hold of even the smallest thing
And pulls it toward the heart of the world.

Each thing —
Each stone, blossom, child —
Is held in place.
Only we, in our arrogance,
Push out beyond what we each belong to
For some empty freedom.

If we surrendered
To earth’s intelligence
We could rise up rooted, like trees.

Instead we entangle ourselves
In knots of our own making.
And struggle, lonely and confused.

So, like children, we begin again
To learn from the things,
Because they are in God’s heart;
They have never left him.

This is what the things can teach us:
To fall,
patiently to trust our heaviness.
Even a bird has to do that
Before it can fly.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Translated by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows