taykair
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We've all seen, or perhaps even made, a flipbook animation. You draw, say, a stick figure on a sheet of paper and then draw another, slightly different figure on a second sheet, then a third, and so on. You stack the sheets, one atop another, and then...
Well, if you haven't seen or made one, then thank God for YouTube, right?
As a kid, I used to make flipbooks by doodling in the corners of my textbooks instead of studying (which is probably one of the reasons I wasn't that good in school). I found an old book of mine recently which had one of these masterpieces of adolescent artistic expression, and it got me to thinking:
Imagine a group of containers arranged in all directions, spreading out into infinity. Now imagine that each container holds a static universe - that is, a universe in which nothing is moving. Each of these universes is different in that they either do not contain the same amount of atoms or, if some of them do, then those atoms are arranged in a slightly different way.
Now imagine that your consciousness is moving from one container to another. Would you not perceive that things are moving, even though each universe is totally still? Would you not perceive this change from one static universe to the next as time passing?
In this "flipbook multiverse", there would be no creation event and no ending. There would be no past or future, since each and every state of what we perceive as the universe exists in its own container right now.
Let's make things even weirder by standing at a vantage point where we are able to see the entire group of static universe containers. (I don't see how this could be possible, but what the hell, it's pre-breakfast, and I still have five impossible things left to think about before I have my bacon and eggs).
Looking closely, we notice tiny lines of light connecting one container to another. Upon closer inspection, we see that the lines are made up of small pinpricks of light. These pinpricks are individual consciousnesses zooming from one container to the next in a fraction of a fraction of a slice of a nanosecond. We notice that some of the pinpricks jump from the path that that the others are moving along for awhile and then return to the group. Are these time travelers? Victims of the so-called "Mandela Effect"? Explorers of alternate universes? Dudes who scored some really, really good weed? Who knows?
Do I think that this is an accurate model of reality? I don't know. Probably not. There are, very likely, a lot of holes in this idea. The more scientifically-inclined among us (I'm looking at you, Harte) will no doubt be able to spot the flaws in it. I just thought that it was a neat idea to play with.
Well, if you haven't seen or made one, then thank God for YouTube, right?
As a kid, I used to make flipbooks by doodling in the corners of my textbooks instead of studying (which is probably one of the reasons I wasn't that good in school). I found an old book of mine recently which had one of these masterpieces of adolescent artistic expression, and it got me to thinking:
Imagine a group of containers arranged in all directions, spreading out into infinity. Now imagine that each container holds a static universe - that is, a universe in which nothing is moving. Each of these universes is different in that they either do not contain the same amount of atoms or, if some of them do, then those atoms are arranged in a slightly different way.
Now imagine that your consciousness is moving from one container to another. Would you not perceive that things are moving, even though each universe is totally still? Would you not perceive this change from one static universe to the next as time passing?
In this "flipbook multiverse", there would be no creation event and no ending. There would be no past or future, since each and every state of what we perceive as the universe exists in its own container right now.
Let's make things even weirder by standing at a vantage point where we are able to see the entire group of static universe containers. (I don't see how this could be possible, but what the hell, it's pre-breakfast, and I still have five impossible things left to think about before I have my bacon and eggs).
Looking closely, we notice tiny lines of light connecting one container to another. Upon closer inspection, we see that the lines are made up of small pinpricks of light. These pinpricks are individual consciousnesses zooming from one container to the next in a fraction of a fraction of a slice of a nanosecond. We notice that some of the pinpricks jump from the path that that the others are moving along for awhile and then return to the group. Are these time travelers? Victims of the so-called "Mandela Effect"? Explorers of alternate universes? Dudes who scored some really, really good weed? Who knows?
Do I think that this is an accurate model of reality? I don't know. Probably not. There are, very likely, a lot of holes in this idea. The more scientifically-inclined among us (I'm looking at you, Harte) will no doubt be able to spot the flaws in it. I just thought that it was a neat idea to play with.