Some People Died Yesterday

And the day before. The day before that, too.

Twitter is the world’s obituary section. Every morning when I wake up, I like to check it to see who died the day before. Yesterday it was Cormac McCarthy and Treat Williams. Forty-eight hours ago, former Italian president Silvio Berlusconi. Tina Turner. The Unabomber. Pat Robertson. The names come at us like familiar scents, reminders of faraway places and times. Mostly, though, they remind us of ourselves. It’s impossible to separate ourselves from the dead because we only know them in relationship to ourselves, the way we know all things only in relation to ourselves. Maybe that’s why celebrity deaths feel personal to so many people. Not because we knew them but because one way we know ourselves is through their work and deeds. The lives of the famous are, in a very real sense, our own.

Yesterday afternoon, I spent some time watching a couple of those Wired videos in which an expert on a certain subject explains their subject with increasing levels of complexity, starting with children and working their way up. It’s always a little worrying to watch one of those videos because my knowledge on any given topic usually stops around the seventh-grade level. I watched two yesterday, one on dimensions and one on time.  

The dimension one was tough for me. I’ve always had troubling conceptualizing dimensions much beyond the familiar three spatial dimensions and the one temporal. I imagine that’s true for most people since, after all, that’s how we experience our world. Sean Carroll, the theoretical physicist hosting the video, works in string theory, the speculative theory which attempts to unify all of nature’s forces into one Grand Unified Theory of Everything!

The problem with string theory is that requires something like ten or eleven dimensions. Which is a lot of dimensions. Like, dude, so many dimensions. And this is where my brain begins to shut off. Where are all those extra dimensions? Carroll explains that they might be all around, just curled up infinitesimally small. Or, he says, they might be very large, membranes that interact with our own familiar dimensions the way shadows can overlap. Extra dimensions might be everywhere but so far we have no way of testing whether or not they exist so the math might be neat-o and whiz bang but for those of us out here digging ditches in the real world, they don’t matter very much.

[IMPORTANT NOTE: I have never dug a ditch in my life and, with luck, never will]

The time one was hosted by another theoretical physicist named Brian Greene. At the end of Greene’s explainer, he had a conversation with a rather severe-looking professor of physics named Massimo Porrati, PhD. Towards the end of their discussion, they had a beautiful moment in which Greene and Porrati talked about the “solace” of time.

An easy way to explain dimensions is to picture them as points along various axes. (Plural of axis, not implements for chopping wood; I had to double-check the spelling because it seemed dumb that we would spell those two words the same way but we do and somebody needs to figure out a better solution) You’ve got your X axis for space and your Y axis for time and you can use those coordinates to locate anything or anybody. Right? Right.

What Greene was saying is that we can plot our own lives on these axes. Cormac McCarthy, Tina Turner, the Unabomber, all of them existing in identifiable coordinates. All of them as insoluble as spacetime itself. We’re there, too, which might hearten some of you. The extra dimensions will pass through us, wrap around us, hold us within. The whole shebang containing everything that ever was and ever shall be and maybe “ever was” and “ever shall be” aren’t so different

So take solace, friends, when you awaken to read the world’s obituary section. Take solace in the deaths of family and friends; they’re plots on an axis now. Take comfort when contemplating your own, imminent demise. You are here now, but “now” may not mean very much at all. Same with “here.” Same with “you.” All of it might just be a burbling noodle soup of probabilities. We’re here, we’re there, everything everywhere all at once, as the title of movie says. The world is both big and infinitesimally small. Our dimensions are numerous. Maybe our lives are, too. It’s a beautiful and terrifying thought. All of this to say, one day Paul Simon will be dead and you’ll be sorry.