No One Narrative
22 January 2011
To Future,
I promise I'll only request this of you when its absolutely necessary: go to a library or a book store and find the section of such place devoted to quantum physics. If you run your fingers through the dust on publications of 2010 and the first months of 2011 you'll discover titles like The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos by Brian Greene. Like others in this scientific moment, they deal with the question and disagreements of quantum reality. With super colliders and miles of mathematics, they're attempting to venture into the space which holds the last fragile whispers of our truest creation story. Their ears are pressed to the wall of the atom, and what they're hearing is remarkable if not unbelievable. Today's physics suggests the history of the universe, the history of yourself and myself, indeed, even the history of the photon which brings my words off the pages to your eyes, is not exactly what we think it is. At least, its not only what we think it is. It's postulated that our universe is one of many or one of an infinitude, and that each subatomic substance we know of, and will one day know of, travels through those infinite universes on every path possible. In short, the smallest pieces of us, and so also 'us' as the sum of those pieces, have infinite histories, having traveled infinite paths, in order to arrive in the now.
