Life is full of mysteries. I’m saying that because today I woke up, opened my eyes and started to wonder if there’s a particular reason for me being in this place now. It is a mystery for me really how did I end up in Bangkok and how is it I’m teaching at university. You could say it happenned because of the choices I made. Yes and not. It is not that I am a fatalist and believe it’s all was predestined. It’s just what sometimes I think the selection of choices we have is rather odd. Before I will explain what I mean, I’d like to share my belief. I think all human beings, realize or not, have some abnormal abilities or supernatural powers. Here are 2 examples of people with such abilities I have met in my life. You can say this pick is random. I guess it is not, as both cases made me wonder and reflect on for a long time. They left a trace. Random doesn’t exist anyway. It is something what is temporary out of our mindframe.
Once I worked as a barman in a pub for a couple of months. Probably I could stay there a few weeks more, if I wouldn’t pick up a fight on a nearly daily basis (himuliating others, in a way, is a habitual English entertainment. Having a Russian barman in their local pub, est. circa 1780 definetely was challenging tolerance of many of its patrons: it shook the picture of their world in a way). Most of the customers were regulars. It was a traditional English local pub. It means what you see the same people every day and hear the same jokes from them daily. You get used to them very quickly. “Regular” is somebody who doesn’t tell you what they want. They will tell you: “my drink, please”, as they come in and drink the same thing every bloody day. I knew most of the regulars not by names, but by their drinks. One of them was an old chap whose drink was bitter. He will be in every evening after work, will take 2 pints of Tetley’s and sit somewhere in a corner hardly saying a word to anybody, like a piece of furniture. He was there Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. Saturday and Sunday were not exception apart he would come early afternoon and will have his 2 pints two times. Once I was asked by another regular, “Bacardi and a splash of Cola, no ice please”, for something like a program for horse racing. I did not have a clue there it was kept. So that chap from the corner told me to look under a pile of boxes with pool chalks and old phone books on a top shelf. I extracted what was required from under a layer of dust the size of level of snow in the middle of winter somewhere in Siberia. I was surprised and asked him how he knew. He answered: - I am coming to this pub every day for over 40 years. I was so shocked what couldn’t find anything better than ask: - Why? - Because I changed it. I lived before in Surrey, - explained he.
Obviously, there was a gap in understanding. Now what do you think, is it a kind of abnormal ability to come to the same place and have the same drink for more than 40 years daily?I was the only one in that place who thought so.
Another guy I’ve met in Rajastan, India could levitate. He would lay down on a bare ground and his assistant would put a big square piece of cloth over his body up to the head and a lot of sticks over it, so if he would change his position, they will fall down. Then he would start to go vertically up, like a police helicopter, still laying under his rug. In the end he’d float a bit on a height well over 2 metres still laying in line with ground with all the sticks in their place, cloth hanging down to the ground so you can’t see how he actually does it. I can’t imagine how he could do it even if it was a trick: this babu was fairly short. He didn’t change his position and he floated way above his height. So he would float up and down and a bit around for a while and then will ask you for a donation. I watched him doing it again and again. We spoke. He told me he mastered the powers of the Nature. - Why do you need money then? – Naturally asked I. - I am saving for a motorbike, - said the yogi.
So, what would be my supernatural ability? In my case it would probably be an ability to adjust and survive as an outcome of my talent to attract a weird set of choices. There’s a function tag surfer on WordPress’ global dashboard. You enter words you are interested in, say, love and death. And it feeds you with recent posts of WordPress blog users containing these words. If you think it’s simple, it’s not. The feed is very odd. You can find anything, from links to anal sex hardcore sites to love poems pouring in between the rest. It’s really about how people interpret tag words and in what context put them.
So I would say, we all tag our life feed in a global sense: our interests attract our choices, consciously or not. The set of choices I have probably could be related to freedom, creativity, and selfdevelopment. And all the spectrum of life probably in between: as soon as we recognize that we have a supernatural ability, all becomes one. As the outcome I have something what some call a difficult life. I live (and now my family too) as a rolling stone. I shift places and juggle occupations.
As we grow older we start to reflect on the past. I started to do so today, as I did what I’ll most probably do with this post in the future: read my notes taken 3 years ago I in London. I used to say to my friends at that time: we should live faster then our memories. To do so we should try to maintain the speed of light, meaning travelling life with empty hands and no regrets or attachments, as a pure thought. As I tried to do so myself, I felt that I live in the future, ahead of time. It’s like one of Zenon paradoxes: my past and my memories never could caught up with me, as I always was a tiny bit ahead.
Though even for a fraction of a second, but I definetely felt like I was living in different time then others. It is a funny thing to say actually, as I’ve finished Michio Kaku’s (one of the scientists contributed to development of string theory) book “Parallel worlds” recently. Apart of other issues he was writing about multiverse. An infinite number of parallel realities coexisting with us, but we can’t interact with them, as they vibrate on different frequences as they are in different energy states. So I felt like I vibrate on slightly different frequency. So a bit over 3 years ago when I was writing this, as I was thinking about my 3 years period of staying there:
“I live in London for nearly 3 years now. I changed maybe 20 jobs, moved from place to place here 13 times and about to move again.
I lived in a disused hotel just above railroad, in a former nursery there everything was of children’s size, I lived in a mansion and I lived in a church. I lived in an abandon factory which was making torpedoes and bombs during the war, I lived in an old public library, on a boat. I lived in a warehouse. I lived in one house with 27 Italians. We used to go to parties all together. I lived with a pony for nearly a year. I lived on a street. I stayed with a beggar for a week in a carton box in underground walkway near Marble Arch.
I worked as a bicycle courier. I worked in a wig shop. I worked as a kitchen porter. I worked as a manager of employment agency. I was a translator and copywriter. I played ice hockey on unicycle. I taught children how to juggle. I worked in fundraising. I was a sandwich maker. I was a barman. I did a market research. I was a flyer distributor. I worked in a warehouse. I worked in delivery. I was collecting dumped fridges in a van with two ketamine heads. I worked in a street market. I worked in a theatre. I was basking for money in the street. Sometimes I would manage to sell a painting. I do not have to say what I had changed few identities and nationalities. This is my London: people live in most unexpected places and have the oddest jobs I have heard about. A friend of mine lived for 2 years in a swimming pool. Another guy made his house on the top of an old chimney. London is a big post-punk Babylonian jungle. If you want to be lost or forget yourself you will not find a better place”.
3 years passed since. It is a kind of strange period of time for me. Let’s say 3 years is the length of my personality decay before I would enter a new energy state completely and will break through the shell of mundane to wonderful unknown, arise to new life as Phoenix.
I wonder what is next.
Boris Kislitsin
Other posts by boris kislitsin
The occurences in your life never stop to amaze me.
I must say I’ve been thinking about the road already travelled too and although there are a few regrets, mostly in the way I treated people who cared about me, I think I’m quite happy about my path.
Still, sometimes I think I’m not doing enough, not experiencing life enough, not being brave enough to look the tiger in the eyes…and at the treshold of a new life in Thailand, this feeling grows stronger.
Life is full of exciting adventures and experiences, places to see, friendships to be made, exotic food to be eaten, women to love…
On the other hand there is family, commitment, consistency, durability, growing together with a women you love, raising a child…I think these are experiences just as valuable as the aformentioned, and I dare say, have an even greater impact on your life.
We always have a choice about the direction our life has to go, every second we influence our future with our thoughts and actions. I envisioned the circumstances of my life in Thailand months before packing and magically they materialized. I’ll ty to do the same for the years to come, giving the universe ample space to work its miracles and I will not moan about whatever comes, ‘couse I will know that I’ve done my part in creating it.
I like what the 85 year old woman said about her life in the previous post and I hope, if I will ever get that old, that when looking back at my life I’ll have a smile on my face and a lot of love in and around me.
Thanks for the comment.
It looks for me like you have to choose: left part (or what they call it? hemosphere? 
) or right one? Which one you’d prefer to have amputated to make your life easier and matters simplified? Can you be raising child and make some new friends or eat exotic food for instance? And what is commitment anyway: duty or pleasure? etc, etc…There’s also always a room for a compromise, such as exciting adventures with woman you love…:)What is love, btw?
But…I guess looking tiger in the eyes is not an option, you’ll just challenge him…by the way, there are some other ways to practice No fear, e.g.: as you live in Thailand it could be useful for you to know what I have read about in a newspaper yesterday: heavy flooding in some provinces around Bangkok and down south, and…38 crocodiles are on loose! Hungry and agressive massive beasts. Police managed to shoot down 10, 28 yet still unaccounted…So…easy, tiger! and careful leaving your house! Being serious, I do not really get the point about choices:
A) exciting adventures and experiences, places to see, friendships to be made, exotic food to be eaten, women to love…
B) family, commitment, consistency, durability, growing together with a women you love, raising a child…
You are being brainwashed and socially conditioned I am afraid, my friend
I understand that probably this set of choices reflects your personal circumstancies at the moment, but…talking about Universe and how do our choices materialise…
So what are you dreaming about now…what are you envisioning? What is your masterplan then?
Why don’t you post your dreams on Memorycemetery…as they intend to stay here forever, we can have a look say, in few years time and see, what happenned and what not and how you developed…self check is a great thing as long as it is honest, you know…and this is what was this post about and a couple of other recent ones as I flip through my archives.
Recommended. Look forward to see it
And thanks for yet another one nice comment,
Boris
Call me a science freak if you like. Still I hope its not all deadly boring staff; and as long as I have this possibility to post my thoughts and references to them, I will. In the end of the day we are all interested in something… some people in breeding cats or collecting empty beer cans. I’m interested in multiverse, parallel universes and mechanics of space and time, as I’m preparing my Big Escape. Anyway, its handy to store everything in one place, providing others with the same interests with the possibility to refer what I find interesting. Here we go. An interesting take on S.Hawking, (who is still pending my request for being a friend on MySpace, limiting off my possibilities to cut some corners and tackle him with a couple of questions ;( ):
Exploring Stephen Hawking’s Flexiverse
20 April 2006
Amanda Gefter
Here’s how to build a universe. Step one: start at the beginning of time. Step two: apply the laws of physics. Step three: sit back and watch the universe evolve. Step four: cross your fingers and hope that it comes out looking something like the one we live in.
That’s the basic prescription for cosmology, the one physicists use to decipher the history of the universe. But according to Stephen Hawking of the University of Cambridge and Thomas Hertog of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), the steps are all backward. According to these physicists, there is no history of the universe. There is no immutable past, no 13.7 billion years of evolution for cosmologists to retrace. Instead, there are many possible histories, and the universe has lived them all. And if that’s not strange enough, you and I get to play a role in determining the universe’s history. Like a reverse choose-your-own-adventure story, we, the observers, can choose the past.
This bizarre state of affairs has its roots in Hawking’s work in the 1970s. Early in his career, Hawking, along with physicist Roger Penrose, proved a theorem showing that our expanding universe must have emerged from a singularity - a place where gravity becomes so strong that space and time are curved beyond recognition. In this situation, general relativity - our best description of how space, time and matter interact - no longer applied.
So what rules did apply? Hawking and Hertog suggest that the universe was so small at this time that quantum effects must have been important. We don’t yet have a quantum theory of gravity, so we can’t be sure exactly what the rules were, but the principle still stands, they say. “The real lesson of these so-called singularity theorems is that the origin of the universe is a quantum event,” Hertog claims. And that, of course, opens the whole universe up to some very strange phenomena.
The famous double-slit experiment highlights the bizarre reality of how a universe born in quantum mode might behave. In the experiment, a screen with two open slits faces a sheet of photographic film. When light is shone through the slits the film registers where it lands. If the light goes through both slits the film shows an “interference pattern” of light and dark bands. Such a pattern is typically produced by interfering waves - one from each slit. What’s spooky is that even when a lone photon is fired at the slits it still creates a pattern of light and dark bands - as if it were two waves.
In 1983, Hawking and James Hartle of the University of California at Santa Barbara, took up this picture and applied it to the evolution of the whole universe. They did that using the “sum over histories” interpretation of quantum theory, first set out by the late Richard Feynman. Feynman suggested that the way to interpret quantum phenomena such as the double-slit experiment was to assume that when a particle travels from point A to point B, it doesn’t simply take one path - it takes every possible path simultaneously; the photon travels through both slits at the same time and interferes with itself, for example.
In this scheme, when a photon travels from a lamp to your eye it moves in a straight line, but it also dances about in twists and swirls, travels to Jupiter and back, and ricochets off the Great Wall of China. The obvious question, then, is why do we see only ever see one path, straight and simple? Feynman’s answer was, because all the other paths cancel each other out. In the sum-over-histories interpretation, each path can be mapped out as a wave. Each wave has a different phase (effectively a starting time), and all the waves added together create an “interference pattern”, building upon one another where their phases align and cancelling each other out where their phases are mismatched. The sum of all the waves is one single wave, which describes the path we observe.
Applied to the universe, this idea has an obvious implication. Just as a particle travelling from point A to point B takes every possible path in between, so too must the history of the universe. In one history, the Earth never formed. In another, Al Gore is president. And in yet another, Elvis is still - well, you get the idea. “The universe doesn’t have a single history, but every possible history, each with its own probability,” Hertog says.
But there is a twist: the history that we see depends on the experimental setup. In the double-slit experiment, it has been shown time and again that if we use a photon detector to find which of the two slits the photon went through, it no longer creates an interference pattern, just a single spot on the film. In other words, the way you look at the photon changes the nature of its journey. The same thing happens in Hawking and Hertog’s universe: our observations of the cosmos today are determining the outcome - in this case, the entire history of the universe. A measurement made in the present is deciding what happened 13.7 billion years ago; by looking out at the universe, we assign ourselves a particular, concrete history.
If true, this is no mere curiosity; Hawking and Hertog have tossed the notion of a unique, observer-independent cosmology out the window and thrown the sacred laws of cause and effect into question. But they’re not exactly being violated, Hawking says - it’s all to do with perspective. If we could stand outside the world, we would be able to see the present affecting the past, as when an observer affects a photon’s path through the universe. From inside the universe, though - from the only place we can possibly be - no observer sees causality violated. What we observe in the present, the “final” state, is one entire, causally consistent history or another: from within any given history, cause and effect proceed in the usual manner.
“Observations of final states determine different histories of the universe,” says Hawking. “A worm’s-eye view from inside the universe would have the normal causality. Backwards causality is an angel’s-eye view from outside the universe.”
So the idea is that to unravel the past, we must sum together all possible histories of the universe. What does that mean?
Hawking and Hertog equate the cosmic histories with how the geometry of the universe evolves in each possible case of going from point A (the beginning of time) to point B (now). To start with, this seems straightforward enough. We can specify the state of the universe at point B by making certain observations of the world around us - the universe has three large spatial dimensions, its geometry is close to flat, it is expanding, and so on.
What about point A, though? Mapping out the paths of a photon from a lamp to our eye is not too hard because we know the beginning point - the lamp - and the final point: our eye. We know nothing about the universe at the beginning of time, however. After all, that’s what cosmology is supposed to tell us.
This is where the sum-over-histories interpretation comes into its own. The mathematics behind this approach to quantum theory contains an oddity: the answers only come out right when the calculation is done in imaginary time. That doesn’t mean make-believe time, but rather a time dimension that is expressed using complex numbers. This is not an entirely esoteric idea: electrical engineers routinely use complex numbers, which are split into “real” and “imaginary” parts, to design electrical circuits. In the hands of cosmological engineers, imaginary numbers turn out to have profound consequences.
Hawking and Hartle’s original work on the quantum properties of the cosmos suggested that imaginary time, which seemed like a mathematical curiosity in the sum-over-histories approach, held the answer to understanding the origin of the universe.
Add up the histories of the universe in imaginary time, and time is transformed into space. The result is that, when the universe was small enough to be governed by quantum mechanics, it had four spatial dimensions and no dimension of time: where time would usually come to an end at a singularity, a new dimension of space appears, and, poof! The singularity vanishes.
In terms of the universe’s history, that means there is no point A. Like the surface of a sphere, the universe is finite but has no definable starting point, or “boundary”. Hence the idea’s name: the no-boundary proposal.
This has led Hawking to define a new kind of cosmology. The traditional approach, which Hawking calls “bottom-up” cosmology, tries to specify the initial state of the universe and work from there. This is doomed to fail, Hawking says, because we know nothing about the starting conditions. Instead, he suggests, we should use the no-boundary proposal to do “top-down” cosmology, where the only input into our models of the universe comes from what we observe now - together with the idea that our universe has no boundary in the past.
Improbable tuning
The result of this process, he says, solves a long-standing problem of cosmology: fine-tuning. Most cosmologists think, for example, that the universe went through an early burst of rapid expansion, or “inflation”. There is some evidence to support the claim, but there’s also a problem. Standard inflationary models require a very improbable initial state, one that must have “finely tuned” values that cause inflation to start, then stop in a certain way after a certain time: a complicated prescription whose only justification is to produce a flat universe without any strange topology, and so on - a universe like ours.
Such a prescriptive method makes hard and unsatisfying work of producing the universe we see today. While a cosmologist can put these values into the equations “by hand”, it is not exactly a satisfactory way to develop our model of how the universe works. In the no-boundary theory, however, there simply is no defined initial state. “In the usual approach it is difficult to explain how inflation began,” says Hawking. “But it occurs naturally in top-down with the no-boundary condition. It doesn’t need fine tuning.”
To do top-down cosmology, Hawking and Hertog first take a whole raft of possible histories, all of which would result in a universe with features familiar to us. “We then calculate the probability for other features of the universe, given the constraints,” Hertog says. Specify a universe that is three-dimensional and flat, for instance, and you can have histories that involve inflation and histories that don’t. “Top-down cosmology does not predict that all possible universes have to begin with a period of inflation, but that inflation occurs naturally within a certain subclass of universes,” Hertog says. The process creates a probability for each scenario, and so Hertog can see which kind of history is most likely. “What we find is that the inflating histories generally have the largest probability.”
In many ways, top-down cosmology is an unsettling idea. Usually, science demands that our observations come out as output - we certainly don’t expect them to be the input. That, after all, denies us the chance to see if the theory matches up with observations. What’s more, the sum over histories is formed by calculating the various probabilities for a universe like ours to arise out of literally nothing: that means we can never know anything for certain about how our universe got to be as it is.
We shouldn’t be surprised, Hertog says: quantum theory has long shown us that it is impossible for us to know everything about the world around us. In “classical” physics, we can predict both the exact momentum and position of a particle at any time, but quantum mechanics doesn’t allow it. No one suggests that quantum mechanics is wrong because of this, Hertog points out - and experiments have shown that it is not. What quantum theory has given us now, Hertog says, is some indication about the nature of inflation, where before we had none. “Before, we had no prediction at all - and indeed no notion of likeliness - on this issue.”
For many, it remains a difficult argument to swallow. Science since Copernicus has aimed to model a universe in which we are mere by-products, but top-down cosmology turns that on its head, rendering the history of the universe a by-product of our observations. All in all, it is very like the “anthropic landscape” argument that is causing controversy among string theorists (see “Putting the you into universe”).
…
The merits of Hawking and Hertog’s new approach to cosmology might be decided by experiment. The theory predicts specific kinds of fluctuations in two cosmological phenomena: the cosmic microwave background radiation produced just after the big bang, and the spectrum of primordial gravitational waves. These fluctuations arise from applying the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics to Hawking and Hertog’s scheme: in this scenario, the universe’s shape is never precisely determined, but is influenced by other histories with similar geometries.
If Hawking and Hertog are right, quantum uncertainty will manifest as slight differences from what standard inflationary theory predicts for the CMB. The top-down predictions only differ from the standard cosmological model at a level of precision that has not yet been reached in observations, however. The top-down signature in the gravitational wave spectrum should be easier to differentiate, but since we haven’t yet detected any gravitational waves, we’ll have to wait for that proof too.
For Hawking and Hertog, there’s simply no doubt that top-down cosmology is the only answer. It’s simple: if you can’t know the initial state of the universe, you can’t work forwards from the beginning: the top-down approach is the only one that works.
Hartle agrees. Hawking and Hertog’s scheme may seem strange, but it is the only way forward because we are part of the experiment we are trying to observe. “It’s a different viewpoint, but it’s sort of inevitable,” he says. “Colsmologists certainly should be paying attention to this work.”
The trouble, of course, is that if they are right, we’re involved in the making of that history. In that case, we have a new set of instructions for building a universe. Step one: look around you. Step two: find the set of all possible histories that end up as a universe like the one you see. Step three: add them together and create a history for yourself.
It seems there are two ideas…the past is defined by how you look at / measure it and that every variation of the universe has the same probability of existing. I’m a little lost on how they’re putting those ideas together though. Either way, if he’s right the immortalized face of the prophet who first told us we are all in fact God is hilarious.
…
Why do you think I’d post it in Memorycemetery? ‘Coz it’s all about memories from my point of view, and the last paragraph shows it clearly: the past is defined by how you look at and measure it.
Here’s the link to the source with kudos, just in case:
http://okgrouputer.blogspot.com/2006/05/heisenberg-lsd-stephen-hawkings.html
BTW there are quite a few interesting comments on it too.