"My Friend Ellie"

[The following is kinda sorta based on a true story, but some fiction may have sneaked in.  YOU WILL NEVER KNOW! HAHAHhahaa... 

Also, names may have been changed to protect identities. ]

Aditya paced around nervously in the hallway, knocking on David's door every few seconds. 

"Dude! We're getting late! The train is at 3:15; it's past 1 o' clock now and the station is almost 2 hours away!" he screamed. 

"Give me twooooooo minutes", came David's muffled voice from inside. 

Twenty minutes later, David finally emerged from his room, and the 'gang of four' (David, Aditya and two others) set out on their way to the bus stop, which was a 10-minute walk away. 

Walking towards the bus stop, they passed by a friend's house.  "Hey, let's just quickly visit Ellie before we leave," David suggested.  Aditya protested vehemently, saying they were already late and could ill-afford even a short diversion such as this.  

The rest of the group sided with David and said "it's better we visit Ellie", but to save time they decided to not to enter the house and just greet Ellie from outside. 

"In any case, the bus stop is just right there," they said, pointing to the bus stop that was now visible, less than 50 meters away. Aditya stubbornly refused to go, and just waited for the other three to come back.  

During the time the trio was at Ellie's house, a bus passed by.  This meant they had to wait about 5 more minutes for the next bus.  (Now 5 minutes is not a lot, but when you're cutting it as close as they were, every minute counts.) 

[The details for the next hour and three quarters are not very important for this story, so let's just flash-forward to Pi-time (3:14 pm). ]

The gang jumped out of the local train at a station which was across the road from their target station.  With hardly a minute to go, they made a mad dash through the heavily crowded platform, roads and commuter subway, towards the train. 

A couple minutes later, the train sounded its whistle and left the station. David and the others had caught the train with only seconds to spare; Aditya could not push through the crowd fast enough and was left behind. 

---

Now here's the thing: 

"Ellie's house" mentioned in the story was actually a Ganesha temple.

A believer would argue that since Aditya didn't go pray to Ganesha, He did not remove the "obstacles" (the people on the station) from his path. Aditya had it coming; he deserved to be left behind. 

Pragmatists would say that had the bunch not made a stop at the temple, they would have caught an earlier bus and made it to the station well in time. They wouldn't have to sprint through the crowd and the above point would be rendered moot.

Who is right?  I guess this is one of the things to which the answer we will never know.  

"Contradictory Proverbs III"

In today's episode: "Time and tide wait for no man" vs "Good things come to those who wait".

Good things come to those who wait? I call B.S!  More like "he who waits, gets left behind" or "time and train wait for no man, and especially not for me".  And I'm not just saying this because I'm bitter I missed a train waiting for others to get ready (and oh the irony, they successfully caught it!).  

Seriously, the train is never late when I am.  (Of course, this applies only to departures.  My arrivals are routinely several hours late.)

Oh and speaking of trains, here's a train of thought for you to pursue:

An empty train carriage is running out of control down a track.  In its path are 5 people who have been tied to the track by a mad philosopher.  Fortunately, you can flip a switch which will lead the carriage down a different track to safety.  Unfortunately, there is one person tied to that track.

Would you flip the switch?

(... to be continued. Some time.  Maybe.)

"Time Travel Theory"

Donnie : Where did you come from?
Frank : Do you believe in time travel?

(Frank is the <spoiler>time-travelling ghost rabbit</spoiler> from Donnie Darko.)

So, do you believe in time travel? Of course, everyone time travels--as you're reading this, the seconds are passing by and you're travelling forward in time. But obviously, that's not the kind of time travel I'm talking about here.

The possibility of visiting the future, and/or changing the past has always fascinated humankind. Time travel is a popular recurring theme in books, TV shows, movies and even games. Great philosophers such as Cher and Lene Nystrøm have wondered aloud what they would do if they could "turn back time".

Is time travel really possible? The answer (of course) is "it depends". :)

For a possible explanation of how time travel might work, one has to go deep into the nature of "time", and that of the universe itself. While an in-depth discussion is beyond the scope of this post, a brief description follows.

We all know the three dimensions--length, breadth and depth, but it is hypothesized that there are at least 10 dimensions (some say 11, some say 26...). It is tough to explain this because the concept is almost impossible to visualize with the capacity and capability of the human brain.

Now think of time as just another dimension. “Time travel” thus just becomes a linear journey along a single dimension. Imagine you are climbing a ladder or walking along a road. As you climb higher (or walk further) you can see things that you couldn't see before. If you climb down the ladder (or walk back), you can again see the things you were seeing before. Now suddenly, time travel doesn't look all that far fetched--you move forward in time and see things that are going to happen; you move backward in time and see things that have already happened. (Of course, this is an overly simplistic view and ignores a lot of variables, but I think is sufficient to get the point across.) This linear movement in the 'time' dimension can be called a 'timeline'.

So far so good. Now, let's complicate this further. Suppose, at every instant in time (here an ‘instant’ is unfathomably small), the "main" timeline splits into infinite other timelines, where each timeline varies from the other by the tiniest amount possible. Every single event that can occur at an instant, and all combinations of other events that can occur simultaneously, are covered by one unique timeline. Now we designate one of these simultaneous timelines as the "primary timeline".

Thus at every instant there exists one primary timeline, and infinite “tangential timelines”, which are nothing but timelines where the infinite other possibilities (which didn't happen in the primary timeline) happen.

Still with me? Great! To understand the next part, one must first know an important characteristic of a hologram -- every part of a hologram contains all the information possessed by the whole. So, if you split a hologram, you will end up not with two halves, but in fact with the equivalent of two (but smaller) wholes.

So now, how about we view the “universe” as one gigantic n-dimensional, extremely detailed, super-hologram, where all possible timelines exist simultaneously? This would mean that every smallest ‘part’ of the universe contains ALL the information in the universe. What does this imply? For one, you and I are part of the universe and hence we would contain within ourselves all the information in the universe--past, present, and future!.

Clearly, then, you already know everything that has happened, and everything that will happen. You just don't know which one is going to be the 'primary' timeline at a given instant of time.

(This of course leads to a lot more questions, the answers to which are beyond the scope of this discussion. For example, what determines which timeline becomes the primary? Is there a single primary timeline for the whole universe or does each entity in the universe have its own primary timeline from its point of view?)

The primary timeline at any instant is what is perceived to be the "present". However, under certain circumstances it is possible to access information in other timelines (these timelines may or may not be at the same 'instant' in time) and this inter-timeline information exchange is what leads to phenomena like 'premonitions' and 'deja vu'.

Once "the present" is defined so, "time travel", including changing the past and peering into the future, becomes a matter of simply(?) choosing the right timeline!

See how simple that was? And if I'm right, you knew this all along!

(P.S: Does some of the content of this post sound familiar? Then you also know why!)

"The Chicken Egg Dilemma"

Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

Short answer: It depends. (You saw that coming, didn't you?)

Long answer: 

The answer depends on what your definition of 'egg' is.  

If you mean any egg (not specifically a 'chicken egg'), then the answer is easy--the egg came first.  There were egg-laying creatures on Earth long before the bird known as the 'chicken' ever showed up. 

If you mean not just any egg but specifically a 'chicken egg', it again depends on what your definition of 'chicken egg' is.  Is it an egg which hatches to produce a chicken, or is it an egg laid by a chicken?  If you use the latter definition, the chicken must have come first, since "an egg laid by a chicken" could not happen unless a chicken already existed (the first chicken would not have come from a chicken egg then, most likely it was a result of a mutation of another species). But using the former definition, the egg must have came first.

There is also a possibility of a third definition of a 'chicken egg', which is 'an egg laid by a chicken, which hatches into a chicken'. By this definition, the chicken came first .

Yes, circular logic is circular. 

Final Thoughts:

If you want to find out for yourself which came first, the chicken or the egg, you can perform a simple experiment.  Just follow these easy steps:

1. Walk in to your favorite non-vegetarian restaurant. 
   
2. Order one (1) chicken dish, and one (1) egg dish.
   
3. Make a note of which comes first.
   
4. Voila!
   

P.S: It doesn't really matter which came first. Both are tasty. 

"Synchronicity"

In a chat room a few weeks ago...

user1: What's that thing called where... when one hasn't thought of something for a long time, and then one day thinks about it, and suddenly that thing seems to be everywhere?
user2: synchronicity?

Since that one conversation I witnessed, synchronicity seems to be everywhere!

The same evening as the chat, a friend and I were talking about good vacation spots, and an obscure island came to mind. I remembered I had acquaintance there, who I had not been in touch with for a long time. 30 minutes later, guess who called me up! And today, as I was thinking about composing this post, the same acquaintance called again!

Another friend of mine called me up twice in the past week -- once when I was about to call sheet (I was a second away from pressing 'dial'), and once when I was typing out a text message to sheet. 'Twas creepy.

I blogged about studies abroad, and between then and now, at least 3 people have asked me for advice on 'giving the GRE' (and they were definitely unaware of the blog post).

I mentioned Russell Peters in my previous blog post, and while that post was still in drafts, a friend pinged me about Peters coming to India.

There were a lot more such incidents, which I can't remember right now.

And for complete meta-ness, the word "synchronicity" keeps coming up in sites or articles I read! It's like The Number 23 -- first it takes hold of your mind... then it takes hold of your life. (And, um, coincidentally, I watched that movie recently too.)