Monday 26 September 2011

Dimensions and Borges: The Garden of Forking Paths

More views of - or at - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


26 September

Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges liked a good paradox (and wrote an essay about Zeno and the apparent impossibility of motion) - it remains to be seen whether this is one, but here goes:


Background
Theory says that, under certain conditions laid down concerning physical laws and arrived at by mathematical calculation, every possible universe, in which every possible way that I could have written this sentence, exists.


Premise
Some say that travel between those universes and / or between what it is convenient to call different points in time in the same or another universe may be possible.


Attempt at a paradox

Step 1 If it is, then clearly it does not matter whether I believe in such travel, because someone could send me on such a journey against my will (or in my sleep).

Step 2 Unless I am very persuasive, and I can demonstrate what I say, if people do not believe in such travel, they will not listen to me (but, in some universes, they will, of course, believe in it as soon as I mention it - every event and possible sequence of events must exist, therefore a universe will exist where (to follow Borges) they crucify me, or regard me as God and worship me - or both))

Step 3 If I were sent in my sleep, I would, if sent into another universe at the same 'moment', still not believe in such travel, but I might come to realize what has happened, and want to go back from where I came from.

Step 4 So, perhaps, people with the same skill, knowledge and understanding develop the necessary technology, and seek to send me on that return journey?

Step 5 But won't there necessarily be the possibility - which may happen to obtain where I am - that one of the immutable facts about that universe is that, because of its physical laws, such travel is not possible? (So how did I get there?)


Conclusion?
For if it is always possible to jouney from that universe to another, then there is one thing wrong about that universe: it does not accord with the notion that there is a universe in which every possibility is replicated.
Oder?, as the Germans say.


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