UPDATE: Tutankhamun, The Great Pyramid, Stephen Hawking, Muhammad Ali... is IRONY THE SHADOW LAW of the universe?

Tutankhamun... he was a minor, once-forgotten king, buried in a minor tomb, and yet ironically he has become the most famous of them all. Irony...

A mind that could grapple with the universe

I watched the movie 'The Theory of Everything' and as I listened to Stephen Hawking’s theories on the universe, spoken with the droll asperity of his speech synthesizer, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of dismay, even anger...

Anger at?

The universe, God, something.

Maybe the unified theory of everything is not to be found in cosmology or physics. Or religion.

Maybe it’s IRONY.

Semantics. Figures of speech, rather than numbers in mathematics. Philosophy rather than physics.

What perverse force takes hold of a man like Stephen Hawking, who could grapple with the universe and crushes him down to a brilliant point of singularity in a motorized wheelchair? Or takes an actor like Christopher Reeve who played Superman - a character able to leap tall buildings in a single bound - and renders him paralysed in a wheelchair?

Who could float like a butterfly...

What made a Muhammad Ali, who danced like a butterfly and stung like a bee, become a shaking victim of Parkinsons?

Neat and deft, Marty McFly

And what force did the same thing to a neat and deft young Michael J. Fox - Marty McFly, of 'Back to the Future'?

From creating sublime music - to deafness

How is it that a sublime composer like Beethoven went deaf?

Khufu, a pathetic little image in ivory of the Great Pyramid pharaoh

How is it that the Egyptian Pharaoh Khufu, builder of the greatest stone structure on earth, the Great Pyramid, has left behind only one image, a minute ivory statue 7.5 cms high? 

The greatest irony of all?

And for believers, how is it that a loving saviour had to die cruelly and ignominiously on a cross?

Then there's the final irony of you and me; how is it that we are specks of sentience in an infinity beyond comprehension?

And so it goes…

It makes me wonder if irony is a shadow law that turns the universe, a hidden law behind all laws.

Images, Wikipedia

Footnote: There are plenty of other examples of ironies of fate in human lives. 1. Franz Kafka - a writer known for his dark and surreal stories, burned most of his own work before his death, not knowing that it would become some of the most influential literature of the 20th century. 2. James Dean - an actor who became an icon of teenage rebellion and youth culture, died in a car accident at the age of 24, just a few months before the release of his most famous film, "Rebel Without a Cause." 3. Alexander Graham Bell - the inventor of the telephone, spent much of his later life working to improve communication for the deaf, a cause he was deeply passionate about, and eventually became deaf himself. 4. Anne Frank - a young girl who wrote a diary while hiding from the Nazis during World War II, died in a concentration camp just a few months before the end of the war, but her diary went on to become one of the most widely read books in the world. 5. Nikola Tesla - a brilliant inventor and engineer who developed many of the technologies that power our modern world, died alone and impoverished, largely forgotten by the world he helped to shape. 6. Marie Curie - a pioneer in the field of radioactivity, who eventually died from exposure to the very thing she studied. 7. Ernest Hemingway - a renowned writer who took his own life, despite having written extensively on the importance of living courageously. 8. Vincent Van Gogh - a brilliant artist who struggled to sell a single painting in his lifetime, but after his death, his paintings became some of the most valuable in the world. What examples of irony have you noticed in your life?