… because he’ll get the joke at the end of it all.

The Spectre Garden falls away behind
with all its fiends and marvels.
Should we glance back, it’s no longer there.
Has never been there.
Leaving nothing, only forward into Tundra absolute,
that final wasteland risen to surround us now.
Hyperborea of the mind, air chill and thin as silk.
These are the far extremities of thought.
Moraine of Einstein,
treacherous crevasse of Quantum theory,
semiotic blizzard.
There are precipices, fearful and spectacular.
The edge best come to slowly, one step at a time.
Here is a foothold, carved by Heisenberg,
whose works suggested that events upon a Quantum scale
are altered by the act of observation.
From here, a few precarious steps
along the glassy ledges of hypothesis are needed.
Since upon a Quantum level
time and space present no obstacle,
it does not matter that the miniature event
observed be distant from us or remote in time.
If we observe it, we affect it.
Trap it in our models,
lend it substance and parameter
with systems of taxonomy and measurement
though it ocurred in our most distant past. Stand still.
Don’t risk another pace.
The cliff face of the deep anthropic principle,
plummets beneath us, sheer and awful.
It suggests that since the Big Bang was,
in its initial stages very small indeed,
with all our Universe compacted to a single Quantum point
of heat and density near infinite,
and since we now observe that first explosion,
tracking its faint whispered echoes
with our radiotelescopes.
Then, by observing, we affect the Universe’s birth.
The incoherence of origination
borrows information from its future,
shapes initial start conditions of the Universe,
so to facilitate the ordering of matter
into simple and then complex forms.
The act of our primordial observation,
sets parameters of mass, of gravity and temperature
that make the early genesis of galaxy and solar system possible,
that ease the birth of planet, continent and life
that will evolve across millennia
towards a state where it is competent to carry out
such observations in the first place,
in the last place.
All existence lifted into being by its bootstraps.
Universe of vast, self-referential thought.
The idea of itself, that brings itself about.
Ultimate magic act in time,
and at the center of the cosmos there’s a plaque,
and on that plaque, it says this:
“There is such a thing as a free lunch.”

— Alan Moore, The Moon and Serpent Egyptian Theatre of Marvels, The Book of Copulation