Fate, Destiny, and Predestination

I was listening to an episode of the podcast Radiolab today on the way to work and one of the stories involved the mysterious properties of a slinky and the way it falls, seemingly defying gravity. Here's a video example to more clearly explain this:

I was listening to an episode of the podcast Radiolab today on the way to work and one of the stories involved the mysterious properties of a slinky and the way it falls, seemingly defying gravity. Above is a video to show what I'm talking about.

In the video you can see that the bottom of the slinky kind of floats in midair until the top of the slinky meets with the bottom and the whole thing then drops out of the air. Basically this actually happens with every kind of object but usually happens so fast you cannot see it. It is more pronounced in a slinky because of the amount of matter joined together is very long. 

All matter in the universe operates in this way, there are delays between molecules and one molecule doesn't know to react to another attached molecule until the molecules reach each other. If you drop a rock in a lake the ripples in the water travel outward in waves, and the water doesn't know to react until the wave of motion reaches it. The same is happening to the slinky, the bottom rung of the slinky doesn't know you have dropped it until the top of the slinky reaches the bottom.

The longer the distance that is traveled the more pronounced these delays become, Neil DeGrasse Tyson made an interesting point, if the sun were to just disappear in an instant, on earth life would go on like normal and you would never know anything had changed... until a little over 8 minutes later. Because of our distance from the sun the light and heat radiating from it takes time to reach us and until the last light and heat waves have reached us it will seem as if nothing has changed.

So what does this have to do with your blog post title?

Well, what if everything has already happened. What if we have no control of our own matter because we are effectively the top rung of a giant slinky if you will and lets say the bottom rung of the slinky is our end or death. The bottom rung of the slinky and everything above it already exists and we are just falling to the bottom. 

Do we really control the trajectory of our lives or has the book already been written and we just have yet to reach the end?

If we can see the past in the stars but the future exists and we can't see it because of the delay created by our distance from cosmic bodies? If all time exists simultaneously in the universe but we can only perceive the time waves that have reached us currently then our future may have already been written at the beginning of time.