Monday, May 19, 2008

Even Infinity Can Get Crowded Sometimes

(Sorry if I may have posted it before. I can't really write anything new at the moment. Here is an old short piece about the universe that I have written.)

There are an abundance of theories on the true nature of the universe. Most have been invented by theoretical physicists who have nothing else to do other than sit in a windowless office in some neglected college physics building wondering if they made the right career choice. Most of these theories are utter nonsense, filled with meaningless Greek letters and bound to exist only in some scientific journal in a dusty library corner. There is one theory however, little known outside the highest scientific and philosophical circles, which would change all perceptions of space and time, history and myth, truth and fiction.
The theory's evolution went something like this. It had been widely accepted for hundreds of years that mankind lived in this big place called the universe and everything in this universe was made up of little pieces of something called matter. This idea was fine by itself and most people just accepted it as the obvious and went on to live productive lives. Scientists can't leave a good idea alone, however, especially one scientist who had spent a little too much time staring at magnet. "If a magnet has a north pole and a south pole, polar opposites if you will, then matter should have its own opposite, antimatter." This theory was met by much laughter and a few federal grants, until one day someone went into a lab and created antimatter.
There was much rejoicing in physics buildings that day. Not only had they showed that their theories can actually be proven true but they had single handedly created the basis for Star Trek.
The traditional practice of jumping on the scientific bandwagon continued. Another physicist, looking back at the magnet hypothesis, thought, "If we have a universe made of matter and antimatter exists then there must be a parallel universe exactly like ours except that it is made of antimatter." Joy flooded down the corridors of physics departments that day as a theory that could not be proven was accepted into law and you knew that this was going to cause numerous papers to be written.
There was one little known tenant to this theory. Quantum theory does not allow only two of something. An event can be impossible, be unique, or be infinite so if there are two universes there must be a third and a fourth and so on to infinity. This brought smiles to the faces of the theoretical physicists, knowing that in an infinite variety of universes there must be at least one where they rule the world, or are married to supermodels, or preferably both. In fact, much of the time spent in the office was now specifically dedicated to imagining these parallel universes as opposed to finding a way to reach them.
One night, seemingly unconnected to all these previous events, two overworked physics grad students were arguing after a long Friday night in lab. The argument was not over the experiment, or over deep scientific theory, or even on why they weren't out at a bar like everyone else on campus but whether or not the color of a professor's hideous sweater was orange or red. The argument grew so heated that they broke into the professor's office to take the sweater and perform spectography experiments on it. Whatever the wavelength of the light it refracted, that would be the color of the sweater.
After setting up the experiment one of the students looked at the readout and declared the sweater to be orange. The other in disbelief took a look at the results and said that it must be red. "You must have knocked the machine,” said Ray, for that was his name. "Either that or you don't know how to read," replied Ron. They finally settled on reading the results together. Once again the digital meter confirmed what they believed and countered the other’s hard fought beliefs.
They both stepped back to understand the results. They read the same meter but it read differently to each of them. It dawned on them that what they perceived the color of the sweater was in fact the wavelength of the light to each of their eyes. Their perceptions were not wrong. This could only mean one thing; that they found themselves at the intersection of two parallel universes. The sweater truly was at two places at once.
The implications are staggering. All this mucking about trying to find wormholes in the space-time continuum is completely unnecessary. Universes are not parallel but constantly intersecting. It's as if there isn't enough room for all possible universes. Like God couldn't stack all the possible universes one atop another but rather shoved them together and had them intermingle at certain points. Even infinity can get crowded sometimes.
What is more confusing is that what we consider a common past is only true because we all believe it to be true. The present may be common, for the most part, for that's where an intersection point is, but the past may be totally different. Rome may never have ruled the world; the Coliseum could just be the ruined shell of a racetrack. What's true in my universe is not true in yours, which explains errors in history books and everyone's misconceptions of the world.
Does this matter? Can we all accept the fact that we are all caught at a common intersection of billions of universes, all slightly different? Is life with blinders on possible, have we been doing it for centuries? Maybe the stories of dragons and faeries are true, not in my universe perhaps but in that of the storyteller. All I know is that the stories that follow are true, at least to those who walked through the mists of time, stepping from one world to the next in search for truth, love, knowledge, redemption, life.

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