Tuesday, August 15, 2006

Reality Unknown - is the reality that we know real?



"When some are lost, can't find their way,
a number of them stray, to where you have come today."

The universe and its contents - both known and unknown have long fascinated the human mind and have been a subject of constant exploration and research at a scale never imagined or sometime publically acknowledged.
Knowledge and ignorance thereafter have always maintained a long and unbridged gap, something that will never be balanced for want of critical imbalance in an attempt to gain a defining edge over the other entity.
The question of whether we are alone in the universe has remained unanswered for a very long time now. Although mountains of evidence establishing 'the unidentifiable third kind' has surfaced from time to time, government acknowledgements confirming the same have never been made and authorities across the globe have commonly and collectively denied such reports and often rubbished as wishful thinking.
Amidst the wildly staunch opposition between either camps, a certain supposedly true (read possibly true) concept has gained emergence and strong belief with the passage of time.
Strange as ever as it may sound, this concept came to be known as The Theory of Alternate Reality. Synonymously known as The other dimension, Alternate Realm, Parallel Universe and so on, the concept theorized (with good supposition) the existence of (many) alternate worlds.
All these supposeldy exist in a condition and environment with no relationship whatsoever to the world that we have come to know and be a part of.

Are we really alone?

Illustrated by myth and historical legends of being a hiding place for the dark forces, the concept of alternate reality is not one of recent times. It seems, atleast, such a belief existed since the wake of intelligent civilization itself, intelligent because our relatively small intelligence could only fathom an unknown realm and remain extremely limited to understanding its nomenclature perhaps forcefully influenced by an unknown external mechanism.
Therefore, could the possibility of being 'one of the many' be as old or perchance older than our own existence. Much much much older?

The concept of alternate reality has spawned many an interesting additional theory, one of the most popular of them being Time Travel.
Originally written and conceptualized by yesteryear Sci-Fi author H. G. Wells in the book "The Time Machine", humanity was introduced to the four-dimension model of classical physics and interpretation of time as a spatial dimension in which human beings could travel given the right equipment.
And then we heard of something called Hyperspace. The concept of hyperspace illustrates the existence of a parallel universe that could be a medium of travel faster than light. Hyperspace is known to contain entry and exit points that could transport matter from one dimension to the other. Quite interestingly, it is believed that the time taken to travel from one point to the other within hyperspace is shorter than it would be in normal (known) circumstances.
Hyperspace, it seems, can exist within the Earth too. Higher spatial dimensions on water and in the air are believed to facilitate ships and aircrafts to travel faster and easier while also covering vast distances within a short period of time!

However, the most common usage and illustration of the concept of alternate reality happens in science fiction. Countless numbers of movies, documentaries, books and of late, games have been made with Alternate Reality as the central theme.

As scientists and authors began to explore the underworld, another popular concept emerged.
The concept of Multiverse. A multiverse or meta-universe is the hypothetical set of multiple possible universes including our own that in a group form part of all physical reality.
Multiverses have found substantial illustration in physics, fiction and philosophy.
The term 'multiverse' was coined and popularized by the science fiction author Michael Moorcock.

In the year 2003, the Scientific American Article - Parallel Universes, May issue presented an observation that stunned me as I read it:

Level 1: (Open Multiverse), A generic prediction of cosmic inflation is an infinite ergodic universe, which, being infinite must contain Hubble volumes realizing all initial cconditions - including and indentical copy of You about 10^10^29 meters away!

The question of whether we are alone in the universe stands outdated which brings us to possibly one the strangest suppositions ever;

Is the reality that we know and dwell in, real? Or is it another realm that connects with a realm of alternate reality?

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