D?j? vu? A Reversible Multiverse

by The Escherian Mind

I want you to use your imagination. You do remember what that is, don’t you? It has been exemplified in Calvin and Hobbes, in the US television show Muppet Babies, and is the source of joy for every little kid who has an invisible friend named “Fred”, who mommy just sat on. Like a muscle, imagination atrophies like a muscle - if you don’t use it, it shrinks and becomes brittle, likely to snap if put to too strenuous a challenge.

Imagine if you will a sphere, perfect, floating alone in the void. From nowhere in particular and everywhere at once a light shines on the sphere lending it a flat, opaque appearance. As you approach the sphere, it rapidly grows in size. The closer you get to it, the larger it looms until it rests firmly in your vision.

Orbiting the sphere at a distance indeterminable due to the lack of any reference, you notice that this is much like the earth. There is a curved horizon with black space above it, as though you were flying around an unmarked 8-ball. Move closer, closer. The lower an orbit you take, the larger the world looms. Flying stomach down towards the sphere and looking towards the curvature, you notice as you float lower and lower that the sphere grows in your vision, just like the Earth would if you were approaching the ground. The curved horizon occupies more and more of your vision. You float closer and closer and all the while the horizon grows less and less curved, and more and more straight. It begins to appear as though the horizon line is bisecting the land and sky perfectly - though you have yet to actually alight on the sphere itself.

Now we require a true feat of imagination. I need to tell you something about this sphere. Though the sphere is an interminable size, you can still land on it. The conditions for this, however, are woefully impossible. However we figure it, the horizon must be a perfectly straight line. Those of you who reason well will realize that, when dealing with a sphere, this is only possible if one of two criteria are met.

1) The sphere is of infinite size. 2) The observer is infinitely small.

As I said, imagination is required. When you finally touch down, you the observer are at the very point where any perfectly flat plain touching the surface of the sphere rests. Without a reference, it matters not whether the sphere below you is infinite in dimension, or you are infinitesimally small - both are true at the same time, and for our discussion, it doesn’t really matter.

Survey the horizon. It is flat beyond anything you’ve ever perceived before, amazing and terrible. You stand on less than a pinpoint on the sphere. You can’t perceive that you are even on a sphere anymore - the word “globe” no longer has any real meaning for you.

We are not done. You stand at the tangent point - for our discussion, we will assume you are infinitesimally small, if only for the sake of simplicity. Look up. Above you looms another sphere, as dark and flat looking as the one that you stand on now. What’s this? The globe above you like a dark moon is growing larger by the moment. Wait - it’s not growing larger, we’ve determined that you are simply infinitesimally small - the sphere is falling! Well, up and down are relative right now, but the fact of the matter is, it’s getting closer!

Standing on your point, it doesn’t matter that it’s coming closer, you can’t be harmed. The sphere above “falls” towards you at an ever-increasing rate. Growing larger and larger, it approaches, its horizon moving farther and farther from being a curve, slowly becoming another fine line - there are now two horizons. You stand at the very point where these two perfect spheres are touching. This point has no dimensions - it exists almost as an abstraction - but still, it exists.

And here you are, at your nexus of the multiverse.

To be continued...