Posted in Life & Happiness

Fear And Possibilities

You are not afraid of the dark. You are afraid of what is in it.
You are not afraid of heights. You are afraid of falling.
You are not afraid of trying. You are afraid of failing.
You are not afraid of being in love. You are afraid of not being loved back.

The natural response to fear is fleeing from it. It is an instinct designed to preserve our life. But fear – like all emotions – is an irrational thing. Sometimes we fear something not for what it is, but what it could turn out to be. Therefore, the greatest fear is the fear of possibilities. Because we are scared of a certain possibility, we avoid the precipitant to prevent the possibility from happening.

But the possibility you are afraid of is merely one of many branches on the tree of possibilities. You might find the dark room holds a surprise party for you. You might find the height will not lead to a fall to your death, but show you the greatest scenery you have ever seen. You might find that the person you were too afraid of asking out may have been in love with you all along.

By not opening the proverbial box, you extinguish all of these wonderful possibilities. No matter how scary it may be, give the future a chance and take a shot.

Do not let fear steal your funk.

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Posted in Science & Nature

Dimensions: To Infinity And Beyond

So far we have covered 6 dimensions: point, lengthwidth, depth, time, alternate universe and travelling between possible futures being the key feature of each. Hopefully, you as the reader have caught on to the pattern of dimensions so far: point (0D) -> line (1D) -> branch (2D) -> fold/point (3D) -> line (4D) -> branch (5D) -> fold (6D)… This pattern of point/line/branch/fold continues past the 6th dimension. Therefore, the 6th dimension acts quite similarly to our 3D world in that we can assume it to be a point.
The 3rd dimension was a point in time. So what could the 6th dimension be a point of? The answer is infinity.

It was mentioned that the 5th dimension carries all of the possible alternate timelines that are created from a certain point. In the 6th dimension, these branches fold up to meet so that we can travel freely between every point. Therefore, the 6th dimension is a point that contains every possible timeline – where anything that can happen in the universe exists. This is infinity.

But by definition, infinity encompasses everything as there is no “end”. Then has our journey ended? In a fascinating turn of events, it turns out that we can not only ascend to the 7th dimension, but there are still 3 more dimensions to travel through.
By now we know that as the 6th dimension was a “fold/point” dimension, the 7th dimension must be a line connecting different 6D points (infinity). How can there be more than one infinity? Actually, infinity is only as great as the initial conditions from whence it was born – the Big Bang. In terms of universes, these initial conditions are the laws of physics such as gravity, the speed of light and hundreds of other constants. For example, gravity is 9.81ms-² in our universe. But if this value was off by even 0.0001, our entire universe would be completely different. Ergo, our universe and all the timelines that have and will form depend on the Big Bang. This also means that there can be many other “infinities” with different laws of physics. The line that these infinities lie on is the 7th dimension.

A good analogy for this is genetics. People’s lives have different outcomes depending on their choice, actions and random chance, but they cannot escape their pre-programmed genes. For example, it is not expected that a boy will (naturally) grow into a woman or sprout wings and fly. But if they were born with two X chromosomes or born with the DNA of a bird, this life would be possible.

Now let us follow the basic pattern to move to the 8th dimension. Here, the 7D line branches to meet yet another point of infinity (6D). And yet again, we can bend these branches through the 9th dimension to jump from one universe to another.

Lastly, we can take all of these branches and folds that encompass all possible timelines and all possible universes and draw it as a single point in the 10th dimension. This one point is the relative and absolute “everything”.

But what now? It is impossible to reach past the point of “everything possible”. This means that we cannot jump up another dimension as no other 10D point exists to be connected to. Ergo, the highest possible dimension is 10D and this is the basis of string theory. The 10th dimension is where the so-called superstring vibrates to form the subatomic particles that are building blocks of every matter in our universe.

As mind-boggling a journey it was, if you were able to follow through from the start, we have travelled from a single point that occupies no space to another point that encompasses all things possible in our universe in all possible timelines. We have zoomed out to the point that there is no longer a box to “think outside of”.

Can one ever reach that point where one knows everything that was, is and will be? To know every piece of knowledge that is the absolute yet relative truth? Although we cannot physically jump through dimensions, our minds can keep rising up to raise our level of understanding and enlightenment higher and higher. As we only live in the 3rd dimension, we have no less than 7 more dimensions to explore and understand. Only when we have reached the 10th dimension can we say that everything possible has been discovered.

Until then, anything is possible.

(This post is part of a series exploring the concepts of dimensions. Read all of them here: https://jineralknowledge.com/tag/dimensions/?order=asc)

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Posted in Science & Nature

Murphy’s Law

In 1947, an aerospace engineer named Edward A. Murphy Jr was involved in high-speed rocket sled experiments led by the US Air Force. The aim of the experiment was to research the effect of sudden deceleration on the human body so to improve the safety of jet fighter pilots. To study this, a flight surgeon named Dr John Stapp devised a “sled” attached to a rocket that could be used on a long track. The rocket would propel the sled to a massive speed and brakes would induce as sudden deceleration. However, they found that the machines that were used to measure the G-force (force of deceleration relative to the force of gravity) were unreliable. Murphy proposed that they use electronic strain gauges attached to the harness of the test subject to measure the G-force, something he learned while working with centrifuges.

The idea was great but there was one problem: the gear kept failing, showing no reading whatsoever. Murphy soon found that the sensors were attached correctly but were wired backwards. This simple mistake frustrated Murphy, who blamed the incompetency of his assistant, stating that “if that guy has any way of making a mistake, he will.” This became the famous Murphy’s law, now simplified to “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong”.

Murphy’s law actually played a fundamental role in defensive design, where the worst-case scenario is always assumed and prepared for. Thanks to this system, the rocket sled experiment was successful and in 1954 Dr Stapp became the fastest man in the world – travelling at a speed of 1011km per hour and decelerating at a force of 46G (it was hypothesised that a human being could not survive past 18G). Not only did he survive (albeit with broken limbs, ribs, hernias, detached retina and temporary blindness), Dr Stapp went to build bigger rockets to further test the limits of the human body.

Interestingly, there’s another side to the Murphy’s law involving psychology. People suffer from a fallacy called appeal to probability, where they believe that because there is a possibility of something can happen, it will happen. The brain is surprisingly inefficient in dealing with probabilities and has a tendency to ignore that there is a relatively miniscule possibility and instead focuses on the absolute fact that there “is” a probability. This is the best explanation for why people are compelled to buy lottery tickets and why every student believes they will grow up to be rich and successful.