Alan Baker - The Book of Random Access (46)

There is no one reality. Each of us inhabits a separate universe. That's not speaking metaphorically. This is the hypothesis of reality suggested by recent developments in quantum physics. Reality in a dynamic universe is non-objective. Consciousness is the only reality. So reality means the memories of each person? That dog that I'm watching scampering across the park in the chill autumn fog, running until he's out of sight in the gloom. Is he in a separate universe? We can confirm that your order was sent from our Fulfilment Centre. Tomorrow is the shortest day, St. Lucy's day, the winter solstice. Four more shopping days till Christmas, and the Sony Wii is out of stock everywhere. The Wii handset is a piece of advanced technology; it uses an accelerometer and a gyrometer to measure motion and tilt, and likewise utilizes both infrared and Bluetooth technology to interact with a sensor bar and to send information to the Wii console. The universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. M-Theory is defined in eleven dimensional space-time with ten dimensions of space and one dimension of time. F-Theory may contain two dimensions of time and ten dimensions of space. We believe that a multiverse of universes exist like bubbles floating in Nothing. Like a star at dawn, lightning in a summer cloud, a phantom and a dream. Mind no longer appears as an accidental intruder … we ought rather to hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter.

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Texts quoted:

Interview with Dr Michio Kaku, BBC.
The Universe and Multiple Reality, by Professor M. R. Franks.
The Ghost in the Atom, by C. W. Davies and J. R. Brown, ed., (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986)
Sir James Jeans, The Mysterious Universe (New Revised ed.), (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1932; Cambridge: The University Press, 1932)

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Alan Baker is the editor of Leafe Press. Other sections of The Book of Random Access can be found in Great Works, The Hamilton Stone Review, and on his own blog, Litterbug. The Book of Random Access has 64 sections, and each section has 256 words. 64 is the number of hexagrams in the I-Ching, and both 64 and 256 are significant numbers in computing. This is the first of seven sections from the sequence which Gists and Piths will be serialising over the coming week.