Connection

"God, how we get our fingers in each other's clay. That's friendship, each playing the potter to see what shapes we can make of the other." (Bradbury, "Something Wicked This Way Comes")

But is it just friendship? Or does the simple fact that we exist mold the clay, whether we will or not?

A few days ago, I wrote a post and various follow-ups concerning how we, each individual life, essentially create our own universe as we branch and turn and zig and zag through the incomprehensibly large, but still finite, combinations of events taking place in our infinitely large quantum multiverse. I came to the conclusion that since any given result can be traced BACKWARD through time (and from a superdimensional point of view, backward is as good as forward - neither is particularly special or relevant) to a particular starting point, that free will was a illusion. That single bright thread of the life, it seemed, was fixed in time.

I was wrong.

Something rang false in considering any given universe as a vast array of choices going forward in time, but a single thread when run backward through time. My analogy was of a frayed rope beginning as a single line/point, then exploding into a fine fuzz of choices and quantum events and nearly infinite results going forward toward the frayed end; but following any particular thread back the other direction to where the fraying begins is accomplished by moving along a single, specific path.

Even when I wrote it, the asymmetry involved in simply changing direction in time didn't "feel" right to me.

That's because it wasn't.

In fact, it is possible that any initial condition can result in any final result. This means that in the infinitely large, chaotic, probabilistic quantum multiverse that it WILL occur an infinite number of times. There are, in short, "life paths" or "time threads" or whatever you want to call them from any initial or intermediate point to whatever "result point" you care to choose.  It's an extremely intricate web in which any point can lead, directly or indirectly, to any other point. And here's the part I missed: It's true whichever direction you look. That is to say, there is an infinite, increasingly dense web of paths tracing back from any "end" point to any "beginning" as well. So, it's not like a fraying rope after all. There is no bright, single path either direction.

This is a computer-generated 11-dimensional hypercube projection (which is to say, the shadow of an 11-dimensional hypercube cast into 3D) which (poorly) graphically demonstrates the possible states of a single sub-particle string between one unit of Planck time and the next (about 5.39124(27) x 10^-44 sec).

Expand that by the power of the number of "string loops" in the universe (that would be "a lot") and it will give you the number of possible configurations of the universe from one tick to the next. (That would be "a lot more".)

And there, stuck in and part of of this thick, incredibly dense-woven mass of sub-particle configurations is the point that is our universe, us right now, in the most "NOW" sense you can imagine, that 5.39124(27) x 10^-44 second spot of non-definition between past and future.

And where we will be next, what version of what universe we will inhabit trillions upon trillions of times over between one breath and another is not fixed, nor predestined, nor pre-determined. We can only make certain outcomes more likely to occur, and the path taken to get to those outcomes is only one of an infinity. And, in case it isn't clear yet, things you have no hand in at all, sometimes crudely represented as the so-called "Butterfly Effect" also change your universe, all its probabilities and directions; literally EVERYTHING is connected to everything else in the universe you live in now, the universe invented by all those strings coming together into this present, then exploding into infinite futures. And pasts.

Quantum Redhead

In Our Next Episode: I further explore the concept of "...getting our fingers in each other's clay."