95 Dudeisms

What I want you to do is, think about your toenails.

Which, okay, little weird right out the gate here, but bear with me. Think about your toenails, and specifically how quickly they grow.

Which is probably not something that’s ever really crossed your mind before, except maybe at a couple of times in your trot when you looked down and went, “Dang, those got long! Need to cut them tonight.”

Not that it’s a particularly abstract kinda thought. I mean, they’re toenails. Right there on your toes. If you really wanted to, you could measure how fast they grow…depending on the tools at your disposal and some math, you could be accurate down to like, fractions of a millimeter per hour, or whatever.

But it’s not like it’s a standard unit of measurement. No one’s eyes are glazing over, no one’s saying “Oh great, here comes the toenail bit again…”

Which is helpful, when I’m trying to ramble on about something that can get to eating its own tail way too easily.

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So. Toenails. I don’t think anyone would argue this point: if you have them, they grow, and take a certain amount of time to do so. Even if you have no idea what makes a toenail grow, and no idea how to measure how fast it does (I’m raising both of my hands there), it shouldn’t surprise anyone that it’s gonna grow, and do so at a certain rate. And if you’ve got a ruler and a ton of free time, you could try and measure how fast it grows. Maybe even get a decent answer.

Here’s the noodle baker: what if a universe existed where folks’ toenails grew just a little bit slower?

Not a lot. Like 1%. Like such a small difference, there’s no change in day-to-day life. Toenails are made of something called keratin (according to the google), and maybe everything else in this alternate universe is exactly the same, except that folks have a tiny bit less keratin in their toes, so everyone’s toenails grow like 1% slower than in “our” universe.

According to everything that smart people know, that other universe also exists. Like, the math says that, in order for our universe to exist, so does that one. As long as you’re not fucking around with shit like how strong gravity is, or changing major physical constants, if you can imagine a universe, it exists.

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Trying to understand the idea of “multiverse” is sort of like trying to lick your own elbow.

One, spending any time on either of them is about the most non-productive thing a human being can do. No value judgement there, man; just, like, there’s no real answer as to what you were hoping to get out of it in the first place.

Two, they can both seem pretty simple and straightforward at first, only for you to end up ten minutes later in a pretzel on the floor with a very concerned neighbor knocking on your front door.

We’ll just assume we’re all on the same page here, whatever page that is, and keep moving.

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We’ve got two definite universes in our multiverse now. In one universe, “our” universe, our toenails grow at a certain speed. And in a different universe, there is slightly less of that keratin stuff in folks’ toes, and their toenails grow just a tiny bit slower.

Otherwise, those universes are identical. Not, like, “you could jump through some portal thing and understand their language and customs” identical. Like, a version of you exists in that universe too. At this exact moment, wherever you are in this universe, whatever position you’re sitting in as you read this, the you of that other universe is also sitting in the same place, in the same position, reading these same words.

Both your feet are stimming at the same time, same exact speed. Every inhale, every exhale: identical down to how long it takes and how many molecules of air are going into and out of your lungs.

Just, you know…their toenails grow just a tiny bit slower than yours.

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Briefly (if possible)…

See, if you wanted to, you could get all Michael Crichton stupid about things and make up a story about how this universe and that universe should be different. Like, in “our” universe, some military general thousands of years ago had an ingrown toenail, and that made him make a mistake on the battlefield, and his side lost, but in that other universe, because his toenail grew just a tiny bit slower, it hadn’t gone all ingrown yet, and they end up winning the battle instead of losing, and Alexander’s army never goes further east than Persia, he never dies young, he has a son that grows up to take over the throne, and Rome never becomes a thing because Alexander’s Greek/Macedonian empire still dominates the Mediterranean five hundred years later. So of course the ridiculous chain of events through the years that led to your parents meeting and all the rest wouldn’t have happened, because everyone’s life became different over two thousand years ago.

For example.

But that’s getting silly, isn’t it? Silly is good, silly is fine, it shows you sides of things you wouldn’t consider if you spent all your time trying to be serious.

But it can also miss the point. If someone has read too much Crichton and thinks that toenails growing 1% slower is a big enough change that it would impact human history, well, okay, fine then, that’s just like, your opinion, man, but, consider this: what if the toenails in that universe didn’t grow like 1% slower? What if it was 0.000001% slower?

Like, so much slower that it would take advanced scientific instruments and shit to even detect it. A change so small that nothing else changes.

We good?

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Two universes do technically make up a multiverse, so we’re doing pretty well here. You’ve got “our” universe, with our toenails growing, and the other universe, with their toenails growing 1% (or 0.000001%, or whatever gets you out of bed in the morning man) slower, but everything else is exactly the same.

Is it a huge stretch to imagine that there might be a third universe out there where folks’ toenails grow slower than in our universe, but faster than in the second universe? Like, Universe One = normal toenails. Universe Two = toenails growing 1% slower. Universe Three = toenails grow 0.5% slower.

We’d notice that even less, yeah? Even more likely that Universe Three is otherwise identical to “our” universe”?

Yeah.

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Time to crisp up the edges of the noodle.

You could, if you wanted to, keep going down this road. Universe Four, where toenails grow 0.03% slower than in Universe One. Universe Five, where toenails grow 0.045% slower than in Universe One.

You could come up with as many different Universes as you could think up numbers to put next to the % sign. Every possible speed you can think of for toenails to grow, a Universe exists where toenails grow that fast, and that’s the only change between that Universe and “this” one.

Even if it’s a bit hard to wrap your head around it, this is where the idea of infinity starts to come up. Math says that there are an infinite amount of numbers that you can put next to the the % sign. Even if you ignore all the numbers where suddenly toenails are growing slow enough or fast enough that human history is changed, there are still an infinite amount of numbers where toenails are growing at a different speed, but not so different that anything else is changed.

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“Infinity plus one!” always made a hell of a lot more sense to me than just plain infinity. Regular old infinities can be split and still be infinite, can be nested inside of each other and both still be infinite, and after a while…well, shit, have yourself a smoke and then say “toast” twenty times. By the end of it, that word means nothing, you’re just making sounds with your mouth and looking a bit the fool about it.

But no matter what any dumb or smart people say about infinity, you can always just say “infinity plus one” and win the debate. That’s all infinity is, in the end: can you think of a number? Can you think of another number? Can you add those two together?

As long as the answer is yes (and the answer’s always yes), that’s infinity.

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Our multiverse now has an infinite amount of universes in it, yeehaw, and each of those universes are identical to “our” universe, Universe One, almost down to the molecule, except that everyone’s toenails grow at different speeds.

And if you scroll back up (like I just did), you’ll remember that the reason everyone’s toenails grow at a different speed is that toenails are made out of keratin, and in each of these universes, there’s a slightly different amount of keratin in folks’ toes in each of our universes.

But what if the keratin thing isn’t the only reason that toenails grow fast or slow? What if there’s some other chemical in toes, I don’t know, call it Toe Juice or something, and it’s what converts the keratin into toenails in the first place?

In “our” universe, we’ve got a certain amount of Toe Juice, and that means our toenails grow at a certain speed. And in Universe Infinity Plus One (’cause remember, we’ve already got an “infinite” number of universes where toenails grow at different speeds because of the keratin stuff), the keratin in everyone’s toes is the same as in “our” universe, but toenails grow 1% (or 0.00001%, or whatever will make you Crichton freaks happy) slower because there’s slightly less Toe Juice in their toes. And a Universe Infinity Plus Two, same amount of keratin, but a different amount of Toe Juice makes toenails grow 0.5% slower.

And so on. Now we’ve got an infinite number of universes where toenails grow slower than in “our” universe, because there’s less keratin in people’s toes. Plus a whole other infinite number of universes where toenails grow slower than in “our” universe, because there’s less Toe Juice in people’s toes.

And, if you think about it, there’s a whole other infinite number of universes where toenails grow a different speed, but because of something else besides keratin or Toe Juice entirely.

And an infinite number of “something else”‘s that impact how fast toenails grow, each with an infinite number of universes with different toenail speeds.

Our multiverse is getting crowded. I need a break.

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Okay. Everyone got a new drink? Good.

None of this amounts to anything more than mental yoga. Stretching out the stiff edges.

Understanding that there aren’t, like, a dozen different universes, each with a different art style, thank you Marvel — there are, like, billions upon billions upon billions of them. Infinity plus one of them.

The whole toenail shenanigans: that’s just, like, a tiny subset of all the different kinds of universes that exist that are identical to “ours” except for one miniscule detail. Toenails. Fingernails. Hair. How orange carrots are. The minimum number of tastebuds on a tongue. The thickness of nose hair.

Infinities plus infinities plus infinities.

Here’s where that new drink will come in handy.

If all of those universes exist — and they do — and the differences between them are so minor that it’s impossible to tell the differences between them without advanced science stuff…

How do you know which of those infinite universes you’re actually in right now?

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Schrödinger’s Cat is a thing, and it’s not very complicated, so here’s several meandering paragraphs to confuse things.

Imagine there’s a box big enough to hold a cat. Imagine it’s doing that very thing: a cat’s in the box. No cat owner will be surprised by this turn of events. What would be a scientific fucking revelation is if there was a cat and a box and the cat hadn’t gotten into the box.

But the cat is, obviously, in the box, and then some madman comes along and puts a device in the box and closes the lid.

That device is a goddamn bomb.

There’s a small computer attached to it, and every second it generates a random number. If that number is even, nothing happens. If that number is odd, the bomb will blow up, killing the cat. 50/50 odds every time. Oh, and he put a boobytrap on the bomb, so if we open the box to take the cat out, the bomb will blow up 100% of the time, killing the cat no matter what number comes up.

After the fucking sociopath is arrested and taken away, we’re stuck. Emotionally, this fucking sucks, because one way or another, that fucker just killed our cat.

But if we smoke enough to take a step back, we realize we’re even worse off.

See, there’s no way to find out if our cat is still alive right now. It’s in the box, and you figure, eventually, an odd number will pop out of the bomb’s computer, and the bomb will explode, and our cat will die.

But maybe it hasn’t happened yet. Maybe, the box is, like, bomb-proof, and there’s no way to tell from the outside whether or not it’s exploded. And that computer is just spitting out one even number after another.

Maybe, right now, our cat is still alive.

And the second level of suck is that we’ll never know. Because as soon as we open the box, the bomb goes off, and at that point, the cat’s dead, no matter what else happened.

Sometimes this whole analogy is used to talk about the cat. Or catS. And shit like superimposed possibility waves and quantum-this-and-that.

But for right now, it’s more about what sort of questions we can ask, and how — when we try to find the answers to those questions — the possible answers change.

Before we open the box, we have a question — “Is my cat still alive you fucking madman?” — and there are two possible answers. Yes and No.

There’s only one way to find out which of those answers is true: open the box. But the moment you open the box, the possible answers to the question change. There’s only one possible answer now that you’ve actually asked the question: No.

It’s like, there are questions throughout the universe that have a bunch of possible answers. But just asking the question changes what those possible answers are.

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Let’s try this again.

The smallest meaningful microscope we have is called an electron microscope. It’s called that because that’s how it works: electrons. What they do is, they shoot a single electron at something, and measure how long it takes to bounce back. Then they move the device over a bit, shoot another electron out, measure how long it takes to bounce back, and so on. Makes a kind of map of the surface of whatever it is you’re trying to look at.

When you’re using an electron microscope on “big” things (compared to an electron), like a tiny chunk of salt, well, if an electron hits that, it’s not going to do too much to it. Just bounce right off, pretty much. That’s kinda the entire assumption, that the electron will bounce directly back, so you can tell how far away the thing is that it bounced off of.

But what if you want to use an electron microscope to look really close at something? Something really small. Like another electron. What happens when you shoot one electron at another electron?

It’s like the balls on a pool table. They’re the same size and shape, and instead of one of them staying in place and the other bouncing right off of it, they both go bouncing all over the place.

(Yes, I’m eliding right over things like electrons being more a probabilistic state, and even more out-there ideas like “one electron” theory. Not to mention butchering how an electron microscope actually works. If you know what those are and have come this far and that’s what bothers you, I don’t even know why you’re still here, go take a bath. And yes, Planck length would be a much more accurate metaphor anyway, but no, I’m not even going near that shit. Not again.)

We have questions about electrons. We know that there are several possible answers to those questions. But the second we try to take a look at an electron, a close enough look to figure out which of those possible answers are real, all of those possible answers change.

Like, if the question you had was, “Where is the electron?” well, since it’s gone bouncing off all over the place, by the time the electron you shot out gets back to you, the other electron, the one it hit: it’s nowhere near where it was when they bounced into each other. So that “answer” you just got about where the electron is? It’s wrong now.

If you ask a specific enough question, look at something closely enough…you’ll change it enough that all your asking and looking doesn’t mean anything anymore.

You can keep shooting more and more electrons at the one you want to measure, and every time you do it, the act of measuring it will change the answer.

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Like I said at the top, all of this is about as useful as licking your own elbow.

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I was doing something a bit literary-ish in the earlier bits, don’t know if you noticed. Sort of a grammatical bit of foreshadowing.

I kept typing it out like this: “our” universe. With the quotes. Makes you ponder, just a tad. Why? Is there something about it that isn’t “ours”? Does the word “our” not mean what we think it means?

So I’ll ask the last big question again: given that there are an infinite number of universes that are so close to identical that it’s impossible for you to tell the differences between them, how do you know which of those universes you’re actually in right now?

Unless I am really, really unlucky with my early readership here, you do not know how fast your toenails grow (beyond “trim them every week or two when I notice”), nor have any understanding of how that process works. Neither do I.

So what, exactly, is the difference — to us — between all of those infinite universes? Is there any difference?

Does it even matter which of those universes you’re in?

(Feel free to substitute anything you want here for toenail growth. Probably should’ve given that as an option a while back, actually.)

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I know I’m feeling a bit untethered right now. Time for some spicy food and a(nother) cold drink. Ground this shit out.

It’s possible to eliminate some answers as wrong. Back to toenails, we could go ahead and measure how much keratin is in our toes. But maybe our equipment is only precise enough to know that there’s somewhere between 5-6 mgs of it in a toe (warning: just making shit up right now; how much is a mg even?). But we can’t currently look at it any closer than that.

So we know we’re not currently existing in any universe where folks have less than 5mg or more than 6mg of keratin in their toes. That rules out a lot. If there’s 4mg of keratin in a dude’s toe, they exist in a totally separate universe than the one you do.

(Question: before measuring it, when you and Mr. 4mg Dude didn’t know how much keratin was in your toes, when all you both knew was that keratin was somehow involved…did you still exist in totally separate universes?)

But that still leaves an infinite number of possible universes where the keratin in our toes is somewhere in that 5-6 mg range. There’a a 5.1mg universe, a 5.01mg universe, a 5.001mg universe, a 5.2mg universe, a 5.02mg universe… It goes on forever. Infinite.

But we keep making better measuring tools, and get closer and closer to a precise answer, ruling out more and more universes that we know for sure we’re not in, until we’re actually counting the number of molecules of keratin in each toe, and then looking closer at those molecules, and the atoms they’re made up from, and the only way to take a look at something that small is with an electron microscope and…well, we already rambled on that a bit.

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There’s an infinite number of universes out there.

In some of them, we don’t exist, at least, not like we do here.

In some of them, we do.

We can rule out the universes we don’t exist in by taking a closer look at the things that define the universe we do live in.

But, it’s impossible to rule all but one of them out.

If we don’t look closely enough, there’s alway an infinite number of possible universes that we could still exist in.

If we look too closely, we start to fundamentally change what we’re looking at, so the answers we get by looking that closely stop meaning anything.

There’s an infinite number of universes out there, and it’s impossible for us to know which specific universe we exist in right now.

But.

Does that matter?

Does it even mean anything to say that we exist in a single, specific universe?

Is there really such a thing as a single, specific universe?

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One last boondoggle:

What about the other yous?

If there’s so little difference between the universes you and they exist in, is there actually any difference between you and them?

Does it even mean anything to say that we exist as a single, specific “person,” when we can’t even say for sure that a single, specific universe exists for that “person” to exist in?

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Ow.