Marbles

Well. This is the first post. What follows is something I wrote a long time ago, but I felt it was appropriate to begin my blog with it, as it pretty much sums up how I think. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem original, as it bears close similarity to one of the Men in Black movies. But actually, I wrote it long before I’d watched either film. So it is in fact my own work.

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I glued some marbles to my ceiling the other day.

Don’t ask me why. It’s just one of those things I felt needed to be done—expanding the boarders my creativity or something like that. I glued a couple dozen up there, some of them just singly attached to the ceiling, but others building on each other, descending from the heavens as it were, twisted
together in fantastic shapes. Lots of colors, sizes—another infinitude of fodder for my restless imagination.

I like to look at them, imagine what they could be, like little kids looking at clouds (yeah, I do that too sometimes). They could be orb-shaped creatures marching across the surface of an alien, toric planet; they could be microbes attaching in bizarre formations to initiate some elaborate dance of which, despite all our “advancement,” we know nothing; they could be idealistic manifestations of quantum wavefunctions.

They could be universes.

Those first three could-be’s were essentially just playful ideas. The last one was a serious suggestion.

In the last century we have learned a lot about the nature of the cosmos. But even with all our new knowledge, we still don’t understand the basic concepts of matter and energy. As far as we know, they might be anything.

So imagine, that in ways we don’t, and can’t, understand, life exists in those marbles. Not organic, certainly, maybe not even composed of matter as we know it; but life just the same, even intelligent. Not intelligence like ours, of course. Our thoughts and their thoughts would have no point of intersection, nothing we could latch onto and thereby understand, by even a little, each others’ consciousness. But suppose they do exist.

There is nothing in common between us outside the marble and them inside it. They ride the frantic unknown tinier than Plank’s length; we, the fabric of spacetime at Newtonian scales. To them, time is a foreign concept; to us, whatever realm they exist in is incomprehensible.

So each marble is a universe. Each one is unreachable, unknowable, to all the others. Each harbors its own intelligences, its own entities and nonentities and antientities that we can’t understand, just as they can’t understand ours. I have a multiverse on my ceiling.

What if we too are just a marble on an inconceivable ceiling?

And if so, what other marbles lie right next to us, and yet forever beyond our reach?