A concept that has been fascinating me lately is that of simultaneity and parallelism, in the mundane, everyday sense of the world.
Perhaps I should explain.
If you’re familiar with Einstein and relativity (both special and general) you’re aware that he pretty much took the concept of simultaneous occurrences and threw it out the window. He said, basically, that the idea of two things happening at the same time is meaningless, because an observer moving through space may happen to disagree with you as to whether event A happened before event B, after it, or at the exact same time, and you’d both be right.
But this, while true, doesn’t jive with my internal sense of time. I know, deep in my bones, that something outside of my observational window of events is happening right now. As I sit at my desk writing this, sipping my coffee and contemplating my next choice of words, all kinds of conceivable activities are occurring right this second. Somebody somewhere is making love. Somebody somewhere else is killing another human being. Somebody’s feeding the chickens, somebody’s driving to work, somebody’s bathing in the creek, and somebody’s making a decision to buy one stock instead of selling another one. Somebody else is sleeping, while somebody else is nodding off behind the wheel, or in class.
And this doesn’t even begin to cover all of the possible occurrences. That’s just the human side of the picture. If you take into consideration all of space-time, then we’re adding in the idea that there are stars going nova and being born and galaxies colliding and planets forming and rogue asteroids being swallowed by black holes and aliens figuring out their local version of the wheel and …
It’s mind boggling. If I start to think about it – I mean, really think about it – I have to stop before long, because I get dizzy. I don’t think the human mind is designed to comprehend Now, and by Now I mean one big mental picture of all occurrences at once – a sort of mental snapshot of the Universe. My mind can’t even grasp a mental snapshot of the planet during one ‘slice’ of time.
One thing that invariably happens when I have these ‘moments’ is that I begin to feel very small. Not insignificant (though I have those thoughts sometimes as well) but small. I realize that I am just one of 6,000,000,000 people on the planet whose lives and daily minutiae are just as important, as far as they are concerned, as mine. Nobody’s life is more or less important than anybody else’s. Each person’s existence is the most important thing in the world to him or her.
Right. Well, I’ve waxed philosophical enough, I suppose. I’d be interested in any thoughts or reactions to this.
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