Two Boys on the Beach (A Parable)

Two boys were sitting on the beach, drawing sketches in the sand with sticks that they found nearby. The first boy’s picture got increasingly elaborate, spreading out more and more until it was incredibly complicated. The second boy stopped drawing and took a good look at it.

“What’s that?” he said.

“It’s my new idea,” replied the first boy. “It’s going to be a whole world. In that world there are going to be artists, like us, drawing their own sketches of our world. It will explain why we are here.”

“That’s crazy. No one can do that!” He thought for a moment. “But, hey, maybe I can help you figure out how to make it work.”

The second boy drew a couple of lines and a squiggle.

“Let’s start with something simple, test it out, and we can go from there.”

“Good idea,” the first boy said. “That can be part one.”

After a fun afternoon of drawing, the boys needed to go home, leaving their sketches and schemes behind. Their wondrous page of designs would be preserved forever in Nature’s Book of Sand. That night, the ocean smoothed out a fresh, flat sheet of sand, where other children could draw and play.

Paul Halpern is the author of fifteen popular science books, including The Quantum Labyrinth: How Richard Feynman and John Wheeler Revolutionized Time and Reality.