Different roads

As I get older, I must think about things more. Often I wonder what life would have been like had I taken a different fork in the road: gone to a different university, done that PhD, taken a different job, not had children, married someone else, taken the job offer in California and so on. I expect everyone wonders this sort of thing. In a multiverse, maybe we do follow all possibilities but we are not aware of them. I often wonder.

See http://www.bartleby.com/119/1.html .

Death

This remains a total mystery. Many religions talk about "life after death" and who knows? With talk of multiverses who knows, maybe the universe is unique to us only and everyone else experiences something different. Maybe what we experience when we die is a total absence of life, much like we before we were born. The only thing we can say with any certainty is no-one really knows.

The scale of time

A few days back I mentioned this link which demonstrated the physical scale of things in the universe from the very very tiny to the huge on a cosmological scale. Se http://images.4channel.org/f/src /589217_scale_of_universe_enhanced.swf .

Now this got me wondering about the real nature of time. We think of time as running at a constant rate, although relativity suggests this is not true. We happen to be human beings on a certain physical size scale and to us time goes, more or less, at the speed we are used to. What if time itself was somehow as strange as the physical scale of the universe and ran at rates so divergent that a second of our time was almost an infinity for some things in the multiverses? That our concept of time could be akin to the flat-earther's incomplete view of a multi-dimensional world?

What I'm saying is our concept of physical size and time flow is just how it is for us. One can imagine other universes where time runs incredibly fast or incredibly slowly. Is it really so odd to think that we are just a sub-atomic particle in another universe, or that other entire universes both in all space and time are contained within each sub-atomic particle that makes us and every other bit of star dust?

I'm finding it hard to put into words the sort of concepts going through my head, but in summary I think the whole nature of space and time is far more of a wonder and a mystery than we think or can ever imagine.

Death in a Multiverse

My religious views oscillate from being a theist to total atheist and back again. Of late, my views have been changing partly as a result of reading The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, which I found an absorbing and honest book.

Nonetheless, I am still basically open minded when it comes to thinking what happens when we die. I am not a believer in Father Christmas, tooth fairies or heaven as such, but I do think that the universe(s?) we inhabit are barely understood and our place in time puzzling. In a multiple universe all things in all time may be possible so who can be sure that this one life of ours is "it"?  The very existence of each one of us is a miracle of coincidences and chances over a period of billions of years: just one sexual coupling missed, or one chance meeting of two people missed, in all that time and you or I would not be here at all. Can we even be sure that we are not living some kind of dream?

So, when we finally drop down dead will we just cease to be? Or will we find ourselves in another universe as someone or something else, even perhaps reliving the very same lives but choosing different paths at the critical moments when we went in one direction and wondered what would have happened had we chosen differently?