Whitehead's Drops of Experience and Bergson's understanding of Duration are ideas in what's subtitled Process Philosophy. The world, the universe and consciousness isn't one great big lump, expanding or otherwise, it's a happenstance that should be grasped as a moment by moment. Each moment appears, becomes real and then is gone. For Whitehead, who was a mathematician, the gone becomes available data. For Bergson, who was a Frenchman with the heart of a poet, the gone goes to memory where it remains in the consciousness, what Bergson thought of as a thickening of duration. For both men, whether it was a Drop of Experience, or a Thickening, the moment of appearance as it becomes real, this moment of coming into existence, is for Bergson, a creative moment, hence the title of one of his books, Creative Evolution. For Whitehead, this moment of coming into existence was unique, if you prefer, for Whitehead, it was a new number never before seen and therefore wonderful in every way. Both men saw the past as an information set available to the moment of making real, and by real nowhere is there a suggestion that real refers to anything outside the minds capacity to perceive and interpret the world and its universe. Why do we care? Because a mathematician called Penrose has played with the math in a circular understanding of the entropy, the order and disorder within our expanding universe, and has addressed the possibility that as total entropy becomes increasingly random, disordered, everything cools down, no mass, a few black holes dotted around, a moment when time herself will slow. The question: Does time stop? Not really. According to Penrose, a mathematician with the soul of a poet, who's not afraid to use the English Language, when time slows to a point the Universe forgets what it is and in that moment of forgetting it becomes the beginning of the next universe.
