We examine beginnings and endings, with a novel set in a nursing home and a physicist who explores the influence of the big bang on our daily lives
What happens when our story comes to its close? The writer Adam Biles begins his novel Feeding Time at the end of life, when Dot checks herself and her husband into Greek Oaks nursing home. When he came to the studio, Biles explained why the residential home is such a perfect setting for fiction, how reality kept trumping the imagined brutality of his fictional carers, and the challenge of writing about old age in a society so dazzled by youth.
According to the physicist Sean Carroll, our story is forged from our beginnings, arguing in The Big Picture that our daily experience of time passing comes from the initial state of the universe just after the big bang. He tells us why he considers higher-level things such as hurricanes and tables to be just as real as the fizzing quantum fields from which they’re made, and how we should revel in the way that modern cosmology places humanity back at the centre of things.
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