This Too Is the Universe Unfolding
Nothing lies outside the unfolding.
We tend to imagine the universe as something out there: galaxies, gravity, equations, stars. But the universe isn’t elsewhere. It’s here too, in the late-night arguments and morning routines, in a nervous laugh or the stillness before a kiss.
What follows isn’t a theory. It’s a series of moments, quiet, familiar, even forgettable… until you see them for what they really are: the universe, unfolding at this scale.
The music was pulsing just enough to make conversation feel like a secret. I was standing in line at the bar, waiting for a drink, talking to someone I saw often at these parties. A friend, even if we didn’t spend time together outside of them. The kind of person who seemed game for unusual thoughts.
I told her I sometimes think about things that are a little “out there.”
She tilted her head and smiled. “Like what?”
So I gave her one.
“If you think about your body at the level of atoms,” I said, “it’s actually hard to say where you end and the air begins. There’s no clean edge. Your skin is porous. Molecules are drifting out of you, water vapor, carbon dioxide, and other particles are drifting in. The boundary you think of as ‘you’ is really just a fuzzy zone where the concentration of your atoms starts to thin.”
She looked at me, blinking once, then again.
“You’re a cloud,” I said. “Not a statue. And you only seem solid because we’re looking from far enough away that the cloud resolves into a coherent thing we call a person.”
There was a pause.
Then she whispered, “Wow.”
And not in the dismissive way people sometimes say it when they’re trying to back away. She meant it. I could see it on her face. This wasn’t just a cool factoid to her. It had landed somewhere deeper. She looked around the room like the walls might be breathing.
“That blows my mind,” she said.
And maybe mine too, at that moment.
Looking back now, I find myself wondering: what would it mean to actually trace a moment like that all the way down the hierarchy?
I am having a thought. In the physical implementation of that thought, neurotransmitters spill into a synapse, nudging a neuron just enough to fire. Its signal cascades across networks, eventually reaching motor neurons. Muscles contract in the chest and throat, tightening vocal cords, pushing air upward. Vibrations in the air become sound, and the sound becomes a word.
The ripples don’t stop there. Molecules of air, set trembling by the vibration, travel outward in waves until they strike a friend’s ear. The tympanic membrane quivers, tiny bones amplify the signal, and fluid moves in the cochlea. Microscopic cilia bend, triggering neurons to fire in the auditory cortex. A pattern emerges, then stabilizes into recognition: a sound becomes a word, the word becomes a meaning.
And then the chain begins again. Neurons in the friend’s brain fire in response, some sparking memory, others stirring emotion. Signals rush outward, priming muscles of the face and throat. A smile forms, or a reply is spoken, fresh vibrations launched back into the air. What began as a flicker of thought in one brain has crossed the gap between two, become sound, become meaning, and set another mind in motion.
All of it: the thoughts, the words, the recognition, the smile, is nothing more and nothing less than the universe unfolding at this scale, every step carried on the backs of molecules colliding, binding, and releasing through time. Each thought that leaps from one mind to another travels by way of this physical chain of causes.
Step back from that moment. Step back from all of them.
From the couple lying in bed, feet touching under the covers, both scrolling their phones in silence.
From the man yelling at his steering wheel in traffic.
From the child refusing to eat vegetables while a parent negotiates with saintlike patience.
From the teenager hovering over the “send” button on a message that could change everything.
From the old woman slicing a tomato with practiced hands.
From two friends collapsing into laughter over a joke no one else would understand.
From the man alone in the woods, setting up a tent before night falls.
From the woman tapping her leg in a hospital waiting room.
From the father steadying his daughter as she wobbles forward on a bicycle for the first time.
From the friends dancing together at a party, bodies close, eyes closed.
Each of these scenes is ordinary. But none of them are trivial.
In each, something is happening at every scale: molecules shifting, muscles moving, neurons firing, decisions forming, stories unfolding. Physical law, biological structure, personal experience, cultural meaning… all layered into the shape of a single moment.
Take a person driving a car down the highway. At one level, it’s a body inside a machine, heading somewhere. But look closer, and you’ll see a cloud of particles loosely defining the body, seated within another cloud of particles we call a vehicle, both gliding across the surface of a third cloud: road, earth, crust. Every particle in motion, every one responding to local interactions.
And if you follow the chain of causes: why this particle is here, why it moves this way, you’ll trace it back through endless interactions, moment by moment, a causal lattice reaching all the way to the early universe. The car, the road, the driver: just one more consequence of those first conditions unfolding, atom by atom, law by law, into this shape, at this time.
All of these moments unfold forward. Never backward.
The mother brushing her child’s hair.
The text message sent.
The first ride without training wheels.
Not one of these will happen the same way again.
Entropy doesn’t just allow these moments. It gives them direction. The arrow of time flows outward from the Big Bang, and we ride its crest. The universe, in all its lawful unfolding, never repeats itself. And that’s what gives each instant its weight, its poignancy, its reality.
Step back again.
From the rooms and the streets, from the forests and the oceans. See a planet alive with motion. A shimmer of light and heat and habit, bodies in motion, minds in tension, hearts breaking and healing and hoping.
Zoom out, and the patterns blur into weather systems, power grids, seasons. The Earth turns. The Moon pulls at the tides. The Sun burns in silence.
Zoom out further. A spiral arm in a whorl of stars. A galaxy among billions. Each one spinning, expanding, retreating.
Back through the galaxies, through the afterglow of ancient light, to the edge of what can be seen. To the beginning, where our models reach their limits, where the familiar fabric of space and time dissolves.
And from that moment until now, every atom, every collision, every pulse of radiation, every self-replicating molecule, every neural circuit, every word, every glance, every goodbye has been part of a single, lawful, irreversible process.
This is what the universe looks like at our scale. Not in theory. Not in metaphor. In fact.
You, reading this now, are one thread in that incomprehensibly vast tapestry.
And not an accidental one.
You are what happens when matter, governed by law, becomes complex enough to feel, to notice, to care.
You are the universe, briefly aware of itself.