Clifford A. Pickover’s Home Page
Clifford A. Pickover’s Home Page presents some interesting reading. It reminds me of the days when I used to be a math whiz, Alas, that life is no more: too much work, too much booze, too many drugs have taken that life from me. It’s a heartache, lamenting what is now reality while pining for what might have been. The melancholy persists, but still it’s fun, once in a while, to read things like this in order to escape the everyday mundanity of life, and return to when life was more satisfying, and the future seemed bright with promise.
This all started whilst I sit at home with a sore throat, a stuffed head, and a voice that doesn’t work. Since I talk all day at work, I didn’t think it’d be a good idea to go in. So I sit home, self-medicating and trying to get a cure for this nagging cold that I’ve had since the cat died. I was looking at the Astronomy Picture of the Day Archive and the pictures I have missed over the last week, when I came upon a page delving into the possibility of multiverses.
The concept of a multiverse has always intrigued me. Alternate realities in which things are just a little different than they are here. Perhaps there exists a “me” somewhere that went to school for mathematics, got a PhD, and is now, at the age of 40 a published author and professor at some major university. Mayhap I am, in another universe, a high school teacher, recognized as one of the best in the country in a Superbowl spot, or a successful politician, or a world-class bicyclist dating a pop-singer, or a best-selling science fiction author with novels that have been made into mini-series on cable TV. Oh, the bittersweet fantasies of a mis-spent youth.
Then, I am drawn to the thinking that we each, individually, inhabit our own little universe, or big one, depending on how you see yours, and I see mine. We each have our own perspective, and make our own choices on what to do with our lives. While we all interact, and can share experiences. What I feel when we walk through the park, what I experience, what I smell, see, think and do are different from what you feel when we walk through the park, what you experience, what you smell, see, think and do. You may smell the flowers moments before I do, and that makes your experience different from mine. I smell the mustiness wafting off of the lake more strongly than you. I am taller, and see the shadows cast by our bodies in the sunlight from a different angle than you. You are more energetic than I and are flitting off to look at flowers, rocks, trees, animals, and that large beehive hanging from that tree. Do we really live in the same universe?
It reminds me of studying relativity and relational math and physics in college. Everything is relative to each other. Point A is at the coordinates 27 by 53 by 91 and Point B is at 36 by 158 by 82. That means that B is 9 by 105 by -9 from A, and A is -9 by -105 by 9 from B, right? Wrong, because that answer presumes that they exist in the same coordinate system. Are they? Are they even in the same type of coordinate system? What if Point A likes to think that it is of a Cartesian coordinate system, whereas Point B thinks it is in a radial coordinate system? What if the coordinate system that Point A is measured in is at an angle of 35º, 72º, 156º to the coordinate system Point B exists in?
These two points exist in 3-dimensional coordinate system(s), but I exist in a 4-dimensional coordinate system: length, width, depth, and extent in time. How can I truly know what the nature of these two points are? Even if they existed in my 4-dimensional reality, how could I truly know their nature? I barely know myself after 40 years, how can I fully know something else?
We experienced something together. You viewed it from your perspective, and I viewed it from mine. You saw it as a negative experience, I saw it as a positive experience. We talked about it, and tried to describe to each other the effect it had on our individual lives, tried to describe our opinion of that experience. That interaction changed our perception of the experience, but still, we each have our own viewpoints that are different from each other. While we affect each other, the question still remains:
Are you in my world, and am I in yours?
I think that while we have an affect on each other, and will probably still affect each other long after we have stopped being directly involved in each others’ lives, we exist in two separate realities: I in mine, and you in yours.
