This stuff is great. When I sit here and close my eyes and stretch my brain out to understand how vast the cosmos is, it really just takes the words out of me. We are so insignificant. My choices are insignificant on such a grand scale. On the macro-scale of this planet they're important, but taken in everything there is to see and do out there in space (if we could get there, if we had no cosmic speed limit to follow) . . . yikes. I'm pretty sure I'm an athiest, but when I put my mind way out there and take everything in, I start asking how. Why. WHY did the elementary particles end up aligning this way so that consciousness were possible. In multiple universes there are likely universes where the atoms and laws don't work together to create anything sustainable and they blink out before they're formed. So multiverses. Why and where. Why does the policosom manifest this way? Even if there IS something somewhere out there and the polycosom is something happening in a slide under a microscope, why them? It really makes me get all metaphysical. But the scientists are doing the right work--even if it's not solved during my lifetime, or my son's lifetime, this stuff is fascinating. I wish I understood the math so I didn't have to take their word for it. Back to reading Anathem--a great sci-fi book if you're into the multiverse theory.
wildfire405, in this, you think like me. Nice. I've got a highly visual brain that frequently goes on free-form exploration, I refer to it sometimes as my brain's sandbox, or playground, and in random moments geometry spirals outward, I ponder beyond the 3rd dimension, geometry, physics, interlocking layers, macro to micro... A recent fantasy: as the neurons are to the human brain, so are we in relation to the universe. Sum of parts, emergent growth, infinitely expanding consciousnesses, various stratifications of meaning, communication, various tapestry threads of sentience/consciousness on a universal, biological scale, shimmering dimensional planes a'la Flatland... (swoon)
I read a pretty cool online science fiction story called Fine Structure which touches on this. I'm halfway debating posting a main topic for it since I can't find one already, but describing it is difficult at best without spoiling it... I'll just pull a section from TVtropes' entry:
Don't let the first story throw you off. It'll come off as mostly nonsense (and it is, I think, or it just went WWAAYY over my head), but I had a friend of mine stop reading there because I couldn't persuade him that's the only section like that. Twenty Minutes into the Future, scientists have discovered a set of technologies that break the laws of physics as we know them, such as teleportation or other dimensions, as well as a list of the real laws of physics. Worryingly, the scientists studying these technologies are dying in mysterious "accidents". More worryingly, the laws of physics appear to be changing over time, in such a way that each newly discovered technology can only be used once.
I'm about 50 pages from the end. Fraa Jad is up to something. I need to know more about those Thousanders.
I found Seveneves at a thrift store and I'm dying to tear into it. I've got two books in front of it in line.