NPR’s All Things Considered, on planning ahead:
You want a physicist to speak at your funeral. You want the physicist to talk to your grieving family about the conservation of energy, so they will understand that your energy has not died. You want the physicist to remind your sobbing mother about the first law of thermodynamics; that no energy gets created in the universe, and none is destroyed. You want your mother to know that all your energy, every vibration, every Btu of heat, every wave of every particle that was her beloved child remains with her in this world. You want the physicist to tell your weeping father that amid energies of the cosmos, you gave as good as you got.
The whole thing is only 4 paragraphs long, and so worth reading.
Along similar lines, Chapter 52 of the best online serial ever The Darling Budds by Johnny Dale, features this touching self-eulogy (it’s sort of a spoiler but not really, and it’s a great point to get into the story of the 52 chapters daunt you):
But Lavoisier proved in the modern era what Empedocles suspected in the ancient one: that matter can be neither created nor destroyed. So, though I myself may end, the atoms that compose me will never end. They will disperse, as we tonight disperse, and will eventually become parts of other molecules, other systems, other organisms. Though time will pass on a scale measured by tectonic plates rather than clocks, a fine enough filter could still sift through the matter of the world and identify this carbon atom here and this phosphorous atom over here as having once been a part of me.
All of me, and all of you, will still be here, our constituent atoms bouncing around forever, embracing for a short time and then moving on, much like Beaumonde students once the weather turns warm.
But of course, one day the world will end, too. Our friendly yellow sun will grow bloated and red, and will eventually devour us. But even then, you see, our atoms will not end. They will merely transition to their new lives inside the heart of the sun.
My distaste for the mawkish is well-known here, so I won’t belabor this point. I’ll say simply in closing that everyone here tonight, and everyone we love, and everyone now living, and everyone that has called or will call this world home…we will not only survive the eons yet to come, we will in fact be reunited. All of us, together…we will become a star.
