Unknowns
I really like this idea of multiple universes. That each of us might be our own universe. Or maybe we’re just thin slices of a bigger universe. And we’re only that which we have observed. So, this means what I’ve observed is different than what other people have observed. And I used to think that all of this was impossible, there’s only one universe, but then I realized, I had no idea the moon existed until I saw it, and no idea what to call it until someone told me, and that was just something everyone agreed to. So, until I saw it, it didn’t exist, and there was no reason for me to believe that it did or would.
And I especially like to think of this multiverse in terms of my marriage, because even though we shared a life of more than fifty years, my late wife’s life was hers not mine and vice versa. And this is where it gets a little tricky because supposedly when two quantum systems interact they each know what the other knows. But I wonder if the complexity of the data being shared doesn’t enter into it, because in the transmission of data, there are always errors, reference Benoit Mandelbrot. So, when my universe interacted with her universe, I knew a lot but not everything.
And so each of our lives was a compendium of the things we’d observed, and while we might have shared those observations, the observations themselves were still only ours. And there were some things we observed that weren’t shared or couldn’t be shared. For instance, how could I ever share how I felt after reading Salinger’s Raise High the Roof Beams, Carpenters, or how she felt when she finished a particularly difficult genealogy quest as part of her work for the DAR. Private things. Unknowns. Secrets of the universes. Hers and mine. And I still need to talk with a physicist, and maybe I will one day.