Hamlet Attempts to Alleviate Ophelia’s Anxieties about Copernican Astronomy, the Impending Post-Claudius Singularity, and Other Riddles of Existence
Doubt thou the stars are fire;
Doubt thou the Big Bang set them all aflame;
Doubt thou the second law of thermodynamics will extinguish every final flickering photon in 101000 years, give or take a few trillion millennia,
But never doubt I love.
Doubt that the sun doth move;
Doubt that a spaceship canst ever exceed the speed of light;
Doubt that hyper-intelligent aliens hath oft dropped by to probe our fundaments and deposit slate-black obelisks and scribble arcane riddles in crop circles and Mayan hieroglyphs and giant chalk horses ever since Cro-Magnons stood erect,
But never doubt I love.
Doubt truth to be a liar;
Doubt the uncertain fate of Schrödinger’s cat;
Doubt Gödel’s theorems, Tipler’s omega point, Vinge’s singularity, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the anthropic cosmological principle, and the simultaneous existence of infinite multiverses where absolutely anything can happen and has and will and does,
But never doubt I love.
– A. C. Elms (with a little help from W. Shakespeare)
[First published in Science Fiction Studies, July 2012, Vol. 39, p. 359]