I'm not in a great way right now, and I'm certainly not getting any better. I'm on three different kinds of medication, and right now, they're not doing much. I've made some serious errors in judgement in my life, and a lot of these are choosing now to come back and bite me on the backside. I think I'm just dealing with things as best I can for now, and just waiting for things to just get easier before I can properly deal with them. Nonetheless, I maintain that things will soon get better.
These meds are seriously playing with my head though. On the plus side, it gives me interesting thoughts and . . . musings, if you will. I was wondering today what a good technical drawing of the timelines of everyone and everything might look like, showing all of the intersections where people meet and their timelines cross, and showing where they branch off as different decisions are made. Essentially showing the decisions and every possible outcome of every decision. It would quickly become massively complicated. To illustrate quite how complicated, I've drawn up a reatly simplified diagram, outlining a handful of events of three people, creatively named X, Y & Z. Yes, I know that ampersand is grammatically incorrect, but it looked pretty. Bite me.
I've truncated a lot of the paths, to show only one, but by just showing three people, and three event points, you can see how complicated it can get. Now, imagine this diagram showing every single person in the world, showing branches for every single decision they make. If you still don't think it's a lot, think of it like this. Just one person lying in bed. Their alarm clock goes off. Do they: (a) Get up; (b) Snooze the alarm for five minutes; (c) snooze the alarm for ten minutes; (d) Switch it off and go back to sleep; (e) Throw it at the wall and go back to sleep; (f) Reach for it, knock it off the desk and have to get up to find it to switch it off? Now, for each of these options (there are six in total, though there are an almost infinite number of possibilities) they can decide what to wear on their torso: (a) a t-shirt; (b) a button-up shirt; (c) nothing; (d) a vest-top; (e) a jumper. This person has 26 different paths to choose from (assuming that if they go back to sleep, they have no need to get dressed at this point), and they have only just gotten up and decided on a single item of clothing. The reality is far, far more paths. Surely you have more than one t-shirt or jumper? Surely you can choose from a wider spectrum of snooze times than just five and ten minutes? You get the idea.
Now, combine all of these individual timelines, linking them together where two or more people are in company with each other, and you have an incredibly complicated (but AWESOME) "diary" of the world. It would begin to get insane though. Trying to imagine how many times the lines would cross actually hurts. It would be damn-near impossible to understand and would be unbelievably large. A physical copy that is actually legible and readable as a map might span the surface area of the Earth several times over? A digital copy might take up more storage space than we currently have capacity, money and knowedge to create. Hopefully this is getting across the immensity of different decisions are made every day. Some decisions have more weight on them than others. For example, choosing what to eat for breakfast might not affect our future nearly as much as choosing whether to accept or decline a promotion that entails you moving house.
But you get the idea. I think I've said that phrase too many times in this post. Ah well.
I am leading somewhere with this, albeit in an incredibly long-winded and waffly fashion, as my Year 11 Religious Studies teacher used to describe my essays. "They're too waffly" or "Good, but you waffle too much.". Seriously, what is "waffle" in literature?
Right, imagine that, for every decision made, a new universe is created. A completely new one, identical in every single way to the current one, only in the new one, you've made a different choice. I'm linking back here, to the thing about parallel universes that I wrote about in maybe my first blog post.
What do these parallel universes look like from the outside? Is there a sort of super-universe in which all of these universes are stored? If our universe(s) are infinite, then what is this "super-universe"?
I get the feeling, however, that if I proposed this idea to Physicists, I'd get laughed out of every university in the world.
On a final, completely unrelated note, I dug out a book that I'd not yet read. If you're into chauvinistic (note, I'm so off-my-head right now, it took me five attempts to spell that correct) humour, anecdotes of a drunken, self-proclaimed dickhead and his hilarious and cringeworthy stories of sex, drinking and spontaneous trips to Las Vegas, go out and buy this book:
"I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell" by Tucker Max.
It is, honest to God, the best book I've yet read. I've never laughed at a book out loud. This one had me in complete stitches.
Nonetheless, I've been writing for far too long, and just nearly missed my Wednesday deadline, and I've still not uploaded my diagram yet, so I leave you with this famous quote from Albert Einstein:
"Only two things are infinite: The Universe and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the former."
No comments:
Post a Comment
Like it? Don't like it? Agree with it? Disagree with it? Well, here's a little drop-box for your views.