16 November 2010

on pringles and strings

If nothingness is limitless and there is an infinite amount of it within which thingyness can take place then there is no problem with either an infinite amount of nothingness or an infinite amount of thingyness is there? It’s not really going to bother you much one way or the other.

If there are a couple of hundred billion or trillion universes out there, or if string theory is correct, and there are teensy weensy bits of strings vibrating one way to make protons and another way to make gluons and gravitons and wot not, or if there are multiple dimensions wrapped up hidden within our own, I see no reason for coffee not to taste good or sleep to be not sound.

It doesn’t seem even that hard to envisage – at least not to my cloddish mind – I twang an open 1st on my guitar and get the note E or play it on the third fret and get the note G. Curled up dimensions hidden from our perception?….Hmmmm, bit more problematic: but if I roll up a sheet of A4, and show it you side on, you're going to have a problem knowing if it’s rolled just once or twice or three times, and the exquisite drawing I made on it when it was a flat sheet is going to have disappeared into dimensions you can’t easily see that will also play havoc with my fine artwork. Ha!

A squadrillion universes? Kind of exciting to think of it actually – but not a problem if it’s not so; this universe is quite entertaining enough for one lifetime, thank you very much. If our universe is held on an M theory brane – with other universes snuggled up alongside it - like a nice loaf of medium sliced wholewheat Hovis or a box of Pringles, with only gravitons being able to make the transition between the different universes/branes/slices?....Nope, still not going to lose any sleep over it - unless vodafone release a pulsed graviton mobile to enable me to converse with other internet sloggers (they’re called that there - in the parallel universe), then I would like one for Christmas please, pretty please.

One thing.... in a world of spontaneously generating and disappearing universes, the concept of god becomes about as useful as a Planck length on a pirate ship - unless it's Christmas.
Shan't lose any sleep over that either.
[edit: the Planck length, denoted ℓP, is a unit of length, equal to 1.616252(81)×10−35 meters = kind of small.]

4 comments:

el. said...

"if I roll up a sheet of A4, and show it you side on, you're going to have a problem knowing if it’s rolled just once or twice or three times, and the exquisite drawing I made on it when it was a flat sheet is going to have disappeared into dimensions you can’t easily see that will also play havoc with my fine artwork."

i like the way of putting it very much. it makes it easier to understand the idea of all this supposed hidden meaning stuff. (:

just like to point out you gave a lot of thought to this topic that is /pointless/ to think bout. lol

very interesting (:

clodhopper said...

Hi El..thanks for dropping by. I know all this stuff is ultra weird, but if someone didn't think about it, we wouldn't have computers or mobile phones or the intertoobz and you wouldn't be able to skype yer mates thousands of miles away.

Suppose you could learn to consciously vibrate the string stuff you're made from into one of the dimensions that are hidden from us? Well then, you could disappear at will and kick your teachers butt :-)or spy on the BF, or kick his butt - if he's being a twunk. Endless possibilities.

clodhopper said...

Oh....and in terms of understanding reality as it reallyis...we probably occupy the same position as, say, an earthworm does in understanding computers and cars and aeroplanes. Just have to do the best we can with wot we got heh?

loobyloo said...

Freud said something along the lines of "Even basic technology is similar to magic". That's why Ladybird books were so good - they explained utterly mysterious things like the telephone.

What puzzles me is that if protons and electrons are separate from the nucleus they spin round, what's in the gap beween them?