Tag: relative

Posted in Life & Happiness

Standards Of Happiness

Posted on by Jinavie

If we list some things that affect our happiness, they can sound a little ridiculous.

The angle the chair reclines to, where you sit at the meeting table, the country your bag was made in, a few letters at the sole of your shoes, the number of toilets at home…

Or respectively:

Business class or economy, boss or employee, “Made in Italy” or “Made in China”, famous brand or cheap brand, one-bedroom apartment or three-bedroom house.

Just a few hundred years ago, these things were not standards of happiness.
These standards were artificial sources of happiness created by consumerism to promote constant spending, or to create competitiveness to improve productivity.

Artificial happiness is usually relative. No matter how much you own, if you meet someone who owns more, you will feel unhappy.
Happiness itself has become a competition.

On the other hand, we also have these sources of happiness:

The number of friends who you can really connect with, flowers and trees, caring and love from your family, a healthy body, a delicious meal.

Above are natural sources of happiness that are absolute rather than relative. This means that once you achieve them, you do not feel less or more happy when you compare yourself to others.
Natural happiness was likely the standard of happiness hundreds of years ago, and will remain so hundreds of years in the future.
Natural happiness enriches the relationship to your soul.

In modern life, we are often systemically pushed into seeking artificial happiness.
But if you only seek artificial happiness, we will forget the absolute happiness we get from natural happiness, and be put in an ironic situation where we are competing to be happier than others.

What kind of happiness are you living today?

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(Image source: Puuung http://www.grafolio.com/puuung1)

(from 1cm+ by Eun Joo Kim)

Posted in Science & Nature

Dimensions: To Infinity And Beyond

Posted on by Jinavie

So far we have covered 6 dimensions: point, length, width, 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

Posted on by Jinavie

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. 

Posted in History & Literature

Right And Wrong

Posted on by Jinavie

Hwang Hee was one of the greatest scholars in Chosun (modern day Korea) and served as a minister for 18 years. There is one famous tale that shows his wisdom and character.
One day, two of Hwang Hee’s servants we’re fighting over who was right. They came to Hwang and asked him to judge who was right.
When one child stated his opinion, Hwang said: “You are right”.
Then, the other child retorted in a heated manner and Hwang said again: “You are right”.
His cousin who was observing this asked: “Surely one was wrong for the argument to have started. Why do you say that both are right?”.
Hwang smiled and replied to him: “You are right also”.

There is much to be learnt from Minister Hwang Hee’s broad-mindedness, benevolence and wisdom even now, over 500 years since his time. Arguments are destructive acts with no gain. Instead of debating the right and wrong of every little thing, it is far more effective to seek relative and absolute knowledge.