Big Brain Big Bang Eternal Recurrence?

Cosmology is an ancient science and I took a course in the subject from the standpoint of Philosophy at St. Louis University long ago. A very batty Jesuit priest named Fr. Foote taught the course & usually spoke in sentences ten minutes long, with infinite tangents and dangling modifiers turning his lecture into terminal confusion. Twice a week. There was no chance to ask questions because confusion reigned.

I do like the New York Times because of its Science page every Tuesday. The only major daily to have a whole staff of gifted amateurs examining the expanding boundaries of our human knowledge. The Big Brain piece today is a splendid example.

I am a devotee if not a follower of Friedrich Nietzsche, easily the most intriguing philosopher ever to lose his mind over conundrums and paradoxes that normal people shrug their shoulders over, but bat-guano CA-RAYYY-ZEEE philosophers freak out over to the extent that they spend the last decade of their life---from his mid-forties in Nietzsche's case---in an asylum before dying of sheer madness.

As my sainted mother, herself of German extraction, would say: "Ach, du lieber!"

Nietzsche's theory of "eternal recurrence" verges on reincarnation and posits that we are condemned to repeat our lives in exactly the same way again and again and again. A little like the cosmologists of Cal Tech and MIT, Nietzsche was constantly bumping his head against ceilings of improbable thoughts that 19th century contemporaries judged to be the products of the spirochete that was slowly eating out Friedrich's gray matter---probably from a careless dalliance in his university days when instead of collecting dueling scars, he acquired an incurable social disease.

Und so weiter und so fort.

Nowadays physicists are actively studying the physical basis of Nietzsche's thought experiments. Boltzmann's Brains floating in free space unattached to owners are a simple extrapolation from FN's wildest divagations. Perhaps if I reincarnate, it would be far wiser to be a disembodied brain floating in an etherial vacuum like the Star Child at the end of Kubrick's 2001 Space Odyssey, observing as he prepares to incarnate on this vale of tears as a Nietzshean Superman.

Was man nicht in Kopf hat, muss man in die Beine haben.