Chapter 5: A half informed take on Time Travel

                Let’s finish off the boring part first. What is a Random Number? It’s just a number which you may not be able to predict. While picking a number from 1-20, a perfect random number would be something which has the same chance of coming up every single time as any other number in the sequence. Secondly, Wiki about chaos theory and you will find - “When the present determines the future, but the approximate present does not approximately determine the future”. Now why am I talking about this here? It’s because, this is exactly what I think that goes into the prophecy, destiny. Though this sounds like a lesson @ high school, it isn’t. These are purely my thought which has a potential to be way too off of reality.

                We talked about time travel and conclusively proving the concept of Fate/destiny. Now, I would say the equivalent of Fate/destiny in life is a Random number in math looking at it at certain point in time. It could be anything and you do not have any idea what’s coming.

Now starting with the premise that time travel is possible… Our man Mr X. goes back in time to a recent past. Just by travelling, he has introduced a new element or a change in the past which would trigger a colossal & random change in the sequence of events later. Random because chaos theory states that an approximate present (because everything is same as the present except for the person who has just time travelled) does not approximately determine the future.  Ie, the changes that are brought about because of a simple change can be drastic and a relative state cannot be arrived at.

Thus we have no idea what the changes that he has introduced just by showing up in past and so, we have no idea of what change it has caused. It might even change the fact that they built a time machine in the future. In which case, he would not exist in the first place. Or it could be that his decision to go to a certain time and place may be different in the next recursion. Maybe the person would again warp through different time and places till he destroys himself so that he’s no longer significant. What I think is, at best, the time machine may be thought of as a machine which instantly vaporizes or erases a person from the present. Or it could also be that since he travels to the present with the time travel device, there is no more of a need to invent or make a new one & progressively improving the time-machine instantly in the past.

Assuming whatever I said, as the subject says, is a misinformed blabber and I am wrong. Let’s take a step forward and look at what are its applications. We can start with energy crisis. The time machine can send people to the past to mine and bring back petrol & gasoline back to the future. This is like creating fuel which is non existent in future. This disagrees with someone who said “Energy can neither be created nor destroyed” unless the time-travel machine compensates for the energy gain by using so much energy. Now if the person is travelling, the amount of energy he can bring back along with him is theoretically infinite. So if it has to still follow the conservation of energy, the machine has to use infinite resources to take a person to the past and bring him back. That’s a weird conundrum as he wouldn’t be asked to bring back fuel if there was already fuel in the future.

Now let’s take a different perspective. Assume there’s some way of time travel without impacting anything in an uncontrolled fashion. There has to be different instances of the life starting from the beginning of time to “Travel to”. Thus what happened on a day has to be recorded at every single instant. Say Mr X travelled to 10:15 PM, that should be exactly the same as how it was back then and it should be different if he had picked10:10 PM instead. Considering the infinite number of divisions of time that he can arrive at, and the infinite number of variables around him, the universe has to record infinite multiplied by the Infinite number of connected instances of life. Really? Who are we kidding?

Chapter 4: The Pulse of Life – A Theory

Why does one like Music? Why do some like a certain kind and some do not? Well… my thought on the same would be something similar to what one would reply if asked why he likes a certain kind of food. If you thought high school physics was a waste of time, here are some concepts for you. They also help me explain my point.

Synchronization:

The body and mind learns stuff like how you learnswimming. First it is all erratic, you drink loads of water and then you catch on to a rhythm and then slowly you become an expert. From the time you are a small kid, you are fed the food at home and slowly that becomes your definition of what food is and what taste is like. Your “taste buds” gets used to it and when you grow up, any food that tastes similar synchronizes to an extent with the old taste. This triggers various reactions like Dejavu, feeling of “Yummy!”, gets you so many search results from your memories.

Resonance:

​You have a natural rhythm that your body is used to and it has a + or – factor. Now when you exceed that, your body can’t cope. For example, some have motion sickness. The body in their case is used to a natural rhythm. Let’s represent this as a wave as we are talking about physics anyway.  Turns out the motion currently is similar to the natural rhythm of the body. This enhances their natural rhythm to a way past their tolerance and eventually body decides to throw out stuff to get out of sync with the motion. That’s something the brain does to get the motion out of sync.

​There’s another case where brain can’t do much. Emotion… When it comes to emotion, brain does not have much of a control. In fact emotion takes over like military coming to power and taking over the messed up country. What does the body do in that case? Well, we go back to being just objects. It’s like a huge tub filled with 90% water. Water represents the troubles and mess that you are in and the height of the tub would be your tolerance level. Time and again, there could be ripples that happen in the same. When it is so huge that it breaks your tolerance, water goes out of the tub. That’s when people resort to other measures to handle the overflown water. It could be crying, it could be cursing people (especially on the road) etc etc

I have talked about the rhythm from the beginning of the chapter. What’s the beginning? Where is the rhythm? Where does it start when all what we discussed above ripples out from? I’m giving all the credits to the pulse/the heartbeat.That’s the clock for your body. That’s the base of what everything runs by is what I like to think. When your thoughts, memories you have accumulated over the years and your reason is taken away, that’s what is left. Now that becomes your music. And you start to synchronize from that.

Now there could be two possibilities. Either you understood the same in which case, you may have a difference in opinion or you might totally agree with me. Or you have not understood at all. In both cases, let’s ignore the same as this is not the end of the world.

Chapter 3: Destiny, the game of Illusion

You go to an extremely gifted fortune teller. He/She tells you stuff about your past that blows your mind away. Things about your family, friends, childhood and you have no clue about how he did it. You are amazed beyond words… Speechless…Well that’s spectacular if someone did that and as I warned you before, I do not have a clue on how they did it either. Sorry I can’t offer any form of my analysis on the same. What I want you to think is about the part that comes after it.

And I mean it!

Only think about it. Think as this is just food for thought. You need to complete my story in your head. Play with it, get to a solution if you can, else wonder what will happen.

Once he/she was done with your past, he gets into the future.Hmm… Interesting! Now let’s say he/she talks about your destiny. Say you were supposed to do some shit & you were supposed to get somewhere and achieve something. You call his bluff and walk off. Why? I’ll tell you why.

Say if the man’s right about your destiny. But the moment he mentioned your destiny, he has meddled with the flow that your life is. He has fed something which would change your thought process at least a little bit. Thus whatever happens later would have happened because he meddled with it. He’s the part that acts to coincide his definition of destiny with your fate. He practically wrote your destiny. In an instant he becomes the key part of your life. He has rooted himself in your life. You are stuck with him for the rest of your life when your life story is being narrated. I for sure don’t want that.

Now let’s say the man’s wrong about the destiny. Well, if he’s wrong, he’s wrong. We can possibly agree that he sucks and close the chapter. The fun part is, once he’s proved wrong, we cannot say that he was wrong. Why? I say that because he meddled with the flow of life when he talked about your destiny. Your life as you know practically ceases to exist with the virus feeding on your thoughts and convoluting them.Maybe he would have been true about the destiny that was to be just a moment before he mentioned about that to you. Meddling with it possibly changed it.

Shall we take it one more step forward?  What if you were destined to meet the fortune teller who was to tell you something? And what if that something was supposed to lead you to the actual destiny?

I don’t need to answer that. Whatever be the case, let’s look at the various illusions the destiny existed in your life. One that existed after some external factor informed you your destiny.Another that got destroyed after some external factor informed you of your actual destiny. Another which is an intermediate destiny and another which was because of your intermediate destiny. Now which one of these is the guy predicting? Who knows? All you know is it messes with your mind.

Chapter 2: Coincidence - The resurrection

       What do we know from the gibberish we've talked about so far? Or rather what do we think we know? Mathematical coincidence is a myth when it comes to real world concepts. Now we still have the concept of coincidence. Even though we spoke against it and questioned its existence, we could use its help to define stuff. To understand why I am saying that, let’s venture into a different realm. This is with the fear of unknowns. What makes a scary movie scary? What makes a romantic movie really romantic? Why do people like suspense? The moments before something appears, you are running the possibilities in your mind with all the permutation and combinations of what may happen. You have just a genre in mind of what might come but the options are just way too huge to crunch through. The brain just overloads... one would like to think. Probably the brain just gathers all of it and comes up with a relative analysis and flags the rest of the information "Complicated... DO NOT PROCESS Further".

          One of a quote which got me thinking is a quote from aRomCom "500 days of summer" that goes like "You can't describe things of great cosmic significance with a simple earthly event. Coincidence… that's all anything ever is... nothing more but coincidence". In case one decides to watch the movie to review the same, stop right after you hear that because they mention something about fate... Mistake! Big mistake... Nothing and no one messes with Fate. But let's not go there.

Let us get back to the concept of coincidence. Just like the unknowns bring life into an otherwise predictable situation, coincidence is one of the factors that bring the flavour in the situation that is. It makes people feel the various tastes in life.Some get happy seeing their long lost friend, some get uncomfortable finding the manager sitting right next to you at the movies after taking a sick leave. Coincidence gathers beauty as you start recollecting the variables in your life.Various things that could have potentially diverted your path away from the situation in question. Different data elements you gathered from the situation like the place you are at, the time, how unlikely was it... etc etc… So many things that could have gone wrong but still it worked out just fine. You might even remember a casual comment your friend might have mentioned when you were in kindergarten that we’ll meet after many many years… The more unlikely the chances, more beauty it brings in. Pretty much like the snow flake which is a graphical masterpiece.

Of course you need to, for a moment, forget about the fact that what happened, happened the way it happened because it was meant to happen the way it happened.

Chapter 1: A blindfolded journey..

       Maybe this disclaimer should come in the beginning for a change.

       Over the next currently unexplored number of unpredictable words & lines that you may find following this, you could be seeing thoughts, food for thoughts, things that lead you nowhere or complete utter crap!
In case you find yourself lost in the text, that would be completely normal. If you have not figured out, the author could be potentially classified as a man with no plan.

Coincidence, Fate and destiny
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      It's everywhere... the concept of coincidence. Two friends,meeting each other after say 20 years at a railway station. So very far away from either's hometown and possibly being the only time either has been there. Or a guy walking through a desert... Who just got pooped on by a pigeon! What made the two possible I wonder... possibly that’s something best explained as a coincidence. But again, is it really coincidence? Or is there anything real about the concept of coincidence?

      Thinking from a mathematician's point of view, every individual can be realized as a function of time and space + miscellaneous factors which are best left unexplored at this point. Visualizing the person's life on a multidimensional plane which plots his path through the time and space to the very point where he's about to meet his friend.

      Mathematical coincidence: Any two lines (for the simplicity of understanding) are supposed to coincide if there's a point(the object being plotted) while they are plotted where there's a single point which is common between the two lines.

      Now what do we need for coincidence? Both the functions that plot the movement of the two individuals need to have a same exact spot in space and time that they share. But is that possible? Simplest thing that can show this cannot exist would be the space function. They just can't occupy the same space at the same time unless they are two Spirits meetings up… This is currently beyond the processing capacity of the author.

      At best, his friend would be another function which is plotted on the multidimensional space time plane to pass very close to your graph. But no they don't coincide. They just passed by so close to be aware of the proximity. Maybe someone thought what if it's not mathematical coincidence? Maybe we can somehow adjust and use the word for something that it doesn't mean, but could be similar.

      Now that I have successfully confused myself, I start thinking what else could it be if not coincidence? Fate? Ah yes... We do have a concept like that. Just because it is often asked if its fate or was it just a coincidence that the two had to meet, maybe we should see if it was fate because clearly it wasn't a coincidence. Until they come up with time travel probably this would be a question unanswered conclusively. Not intending to get into the controversial topic of the possibility of time travel, let's assume it is plain and simple… impossible! Now Iwould go to the extent to say that the two met because it was their fate to do so. Now can I prove myself wrong? Probably not! Just to start with what fate is, the two were supposed to meet the exact same place (close proximity to the space-time graph). It's like someone plotted the graph before you actually traversed the exact path. Well, that would bring you to a point where you would think, did any of my decisions matter? Or was I destined to make those decisions?

      That brings us to Destiny. Let's take a hypothetical movie to dissect and observe to avoid being targeted by a diehard fan. What can I say, I advocate non-violence. Say the movie is about destiny, something is said in the beginning of the movie as this is going to happen. But the actors over the course of the movie do a lot of "decision making" and eventually the movie ends up either as predicted or differently. They portray this as because the protagonist proceeds to bend destiny to "make his own". While the person lives in the bubble of that he bent destiny to his will, let’s ask him... Why did you pick Road A instead of Road B? Are you sure you were not destined to pick Road A and not the Road B. And maybe the Prophecy was the one which was wrong and the destiny was not actually rewritten, it was followed. Regardless of whatever stunts the person has performed to get where it got to, it had to eventually happen the way it has.