The Solace of Quantum

I've been thinking about Many Worlds lately.

Many Worlds is capitalised because it's a theory, first formalised by the late physicist Hugh Everett III, often thought of as one of the lost genii of the 20th Century. His theory gained little credence when he first proposed it, at least partly as the mathematics needed to describe it didn't exist. Since then, the mathematics needed to test and examine the theory have been developed, and his star has risen steadily as more and more physicists believe he is on to something. He was also the father of the brilliant Mark Everett, lead singer of the Eels who made a fascinating and moving documentary about their relationship and the underpinnings of the Many Worlds theory (see link at bottom of blog).

VERY briefly it says that due to the probabilistic nature of particle behaviour at the quantum level, every possible state of of every possible outcome, is. Every path a particle could have made, every path you could have taken and didn't, was made, in other parallel/branched/nested universes. This actually explains, very neatly, many of the otherwise mysterious observed behaviours of quantum level events. I've even seen a demonstration of the effect, the famous Double Slit photon Experiment, with my own eyes.

It has been suggested that this 'path branching' occurs only with the interaction of a concious mind (generated by our brains, which it turns out do operate at a quantum level) implying that our choices are more than just value based decisions; they are quantum knives, splitting maybes into worlds. And it could also be that we 'slip' between these worlds, these parallel branches more often than we realise, at least the ones that are closest to the sum over N value of our probable, potential states.
In my head anyway...

It certainly makes sense to me.
That may be because of my slightly were-mind, which obviously makes me feel not quite like everyone else, or the fact that compared to most people I seem to have had a succession of very different lives, so I am more likely to be seduced by the idea of alternate paths. I can point, as we all can, to times were a seemingly inconsequential decision was made which subsequently utterly transformed my life. Not getting a lift on a bike that crashed, hitching down to Cornwall for a couple of weeks, staying for another pint in the Swordid beer garden two summers ago.
Looking back, it's easy to see these nexuses, and to wonder what would have happened if... Well it seems one of you, somewhere, knows.

My acceptance may also be because I have actually experienced the shifts. Possibly. I have met a man I 'knew' had died, and have seen some odd things that don't seem to bother anyone else. Or is just that I was looking harder? I can remember coming ashore once when I was fishing, looking at the money I was being paid with and thinking when did fiver's get that small, and who the hell is that on the back?
Fishing is the kind of occupation that disassociates you from normal life though, so it may just have been the feeling of transience and Otherness that comes with the danger of the job and the way you are treated ashore. Or the Guinness I'd been drinking.

Or, it maybe that my life at the moment is so hilariously, relentlessly rubbish (barring the occasional day, and person and son - you know who you are) that I would believe anything, rather than that This Is All There Is.

There's two* possible ways of looking at all this I guess from a philosophical point of view, negatively and positively. It could release you from moderate behaviour and give you the ethical license to do anything you want, knowing that you are only one of an infinite series of Wolfs and therefore your wicked actions are statistically insignificant. For everyone you hurt, there are more that you didn't. Out There. Or you could be dead. Or everyone you have ever known could be. All of which are equally depressing conclusions.

Or, you could take the view that if you try to do the right thing for those that you love in this world, then that striving, that will to good, could be propagated through the worlds, increasing the amount of happy endings for you and your pack throughout the multiverse. The likelihood is, if you have loved someone in this world branch, you will love them in all the myriad branches since then. And who knows, in some of them they may love you too.

Somewhere out there, not many worlds away, there are countless Marroks, each shaving a little more than the previous Marrok and worrying a little more about when the next full moon is coming along.
Somewhere out there, there are a billion worlds, where all those I love are within reach and happy, where I am not alone. And that for me is a solace of sorts, for now.
In this world.

*actually there are shed loads if you think about it, but two will do for me thanks.

http://www.pbs.org/remotelyconnected/2008/10/parallel_lives_parallel_univer.html

Beneath the mundane

Having an empty weekend the wolf decides to try to fill it with a long walk in the sun and some Art. Plugging his head into the Yip-pod he sets off to the rather excellent Exchange Gallery in Penzance via Mousehole. If you knew where the wolf lives you'd realise how circuitous a route that is. And how much he has to think about.

Currently on display in the Exchange is Andy Currie's Turbulence, a title that has the wolf fighting not to make cheap jokes about a local Indian take-away. This is the second time he's seen the exhibition and he is as enthralled and intrigued as the first time.

Having no formal education in big first letter 'Art' has always pleased the wolf, knowing that his responses to what he sees are his own, and far outweighs the potential loss of nuance that a 'real' understanding of the cultural context of a work could bring. The wolf is arrogant enough to think that he has a cultural context of his own thank you, and analyses what he sees within that (and that of his friends and his son when they accompany him), in exactly the same way that he reads poetry; by making himself and his own experiences the measure of a work.

There are four pieces in the gallery, described as installations, but better and less pretentiously described in the wolf's opinion as kinetic sculptures. All are interesting but two absolutely entrance the wolf.

The first is called 28 Steel Rods, a set of fine steel bars, perhaps 4m long, hanging from what look like wiper motors and bent into shallow arcs by their contact with the floor below. The curvature of these arcs is constantly and rhythmically changed as tension is increased and released, snapping the bars into a random, infinite, yet constrained series of vertical compositions. These shapes provoke a strange nostalgia in the wolf and it takes him sometime to realise why.

In at least one of his previous lives the wolf was part-raised in a New Town, constructed in the 50's. The New Town centre in particular was decorated and detailed with sculpture, colour, murals and mosaics in the peculiarly resonant and optimistic abstract style associated with that decade. The wolf suspects that for most people within 10 years of his age range, 'old fashioned' chintz and Edwardian vernacular art provided much of the background detail of their early years. For the wolf, raised by commies, atheists and working class futurists in a town built to celebrate post-war optimism, abstraction, flat colour areas and the constructed relationship of surface and line remind him of a place he once thought of as home. And also trigger a sense of loss, of lost pasts and lost futures.

The second piece is called Dust Sheets and is in the picture above. It consists of seven plastic dust sheets coiling, tumbling and flexing above softly whirring domestic fans, and is wonderful. Again providing a glimpse of the infinite, bounded by the utterly mundane limits of its starting conditions (seven B&Q dust sheets, seven Argos fans), while every second revealing a new, beautiful, and transient form. The wolf is reminded of Blake's Auguries of Innocence (and incidentally one of his tattoos)

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

The wolf wonders at the dancing sheets, released from the search for pattern and meaning in his own life, at least for a while. There is something melancholy and something supra-natural about these forms, as if they are constantly attempting and constantly failing to describe something that is forever outside of human experience, unknowable: something powerful and mysterious. An inferred quantum level event of some kind perhaps, or the shadow (not the form) of a terrible angel's wings in motion. A disturbing and alien beauty.

Blake saw angels.
The wolf knows someone who once saw one too.
He wonders what they would make of this.
(strokes chin)

Time to walk back.

Fate and the Werewolf

There is
Apparently
Something easy
Something safe
In hurting me.

Ask Fate.

Try it -
Kick me stab me
Use me lose me
Ignore
And drain me.
Loads do.
Fate has.

Still...
I get up
I shudder
Shuffle and shrug
I uncoil and chuckle
And produce
A carnivore grin
That gleams and widens.

Wider than you.
Wider than you
Fate...