More views of - or at - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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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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