Thoughts to You from Yours Truly - ( TYYT ) - ( 87 ) - A question of perspective
A Question of Perspective
There is no absolute truth only facts viewed from different perspectives. This calls to mind the telling fable of the four blind men expressing their views on an elephant they have never seen before they lost their vision. The one who touches the elephant's trunk says the elephant is like a garden hose. The other who feels the elephant's leg describes it as in the shape of a tree. Still another who is in contact with the elephant's tail calls it a rope. The fourth blind man who grabs the elephant's ear cries out loud to say that it is like a fan. All of them are partially correct but none is totally right about the appearance of the elephant. As for men with proper vision, they can always laugh their heads off because they can have a full view of the whole elephant. But if they were to be restricted to a stationary position within a distance of, say one foot from the huge beast how would the elephant look to them then ?
Of course, at such a close distance, they could only have a partial view of the animal and could never make out the complete profile of the beast now. It is all a matter of perspective.
Going back to the olden days, men maintained that the earth was the centre of the universe because they saw the sun rising in the east and setting in the west everyday. From their perspective, they had concluded that our earth should be the centre of the universe. Only if our ancestors had deep space probes like ours to take a wider perspective of the solar system from deep space, then they could have got the real situation and realized our physical insignificance. May be then, there would have been fewer wars fought on this earth in an attempt to dominate this minute dot of a blue marble floating in an immense and dark sea of over 70 billion trillion stars like our sun in this unimaginably vast space known as the visible part of the universe. Only if we can put things in their proper perspectives and everything would be fine and peaceful for everyone. In the words of E.M. Forster again :- “ Only connect........” and you will see the world in a different light. I would boldly add the following appendix or extension - Only Connect and you will be human and have better foresight. To me, foresight ( looking forward – in time ) is another way of looking at things from a wider perspective by moving a few steps back at a farther distance ( in space ) to acquire a fuller picture of a given situation. According to Einstein's Special Relativity, space-time is one continuum or a continuous entity. Looking back far into space in astronomy is equivalent to looking back in time. Therefore, a telescope is, in a way, a kind of time machine capable of retrieving information from back in time, the past. Knowing the past better will help in predicting our future more accurately and hence better foresight. Furthermore, a higher dimensional perspective is also a wider and more comprehensive one. Take our maps for example. It is, in fact, a higher aerial view taken over the landscape and a wider perspective of the geographical region under surveillance. It is also a rule of physics that a conscious being at a higher dimensional level of existence will always have a better grasp of the reality than one existing at a lower spatial dimension. No one can argue with the fact that one sees further when standing on a mountain top than on level ground. This is the same with levels of our knowledge. Once you have attained a higher level of understanding, the simpler ideas will become clear as day. You can even easily correlate ( as I have learned in this present intellectual journey ) all the different seemingly unrelated pieces of the big puzzle ( that is the universe ) that you have previously found to be strange and incomprehensible to you.
In a scientific novel full of satire called Flatland written by Edwin Abbott Abbott in 1884, this English headmaster and a Shakespearean scholar told a story of a two dimensional world inhabited by lines, triangles and squares of Euclidean ( plane ) geometry. These two dimensional inhabitants could not visualise what it was like to live in a three dimensional world which they had heard about. Then, in came the Sphere which is a three dimensional creature. This hero in the story taught the flatlanders a completely new perspective of what the world could be like in a higher dimension. The book had a very acute social angle that made fun of the rigid Victorian English morality. For example, it portrayed the female members of Flatland society as thin lines which were even more inferior to the slimmest of triangles ( accusing society of sex discrimination ) and it depicted the Priesthood ( the clergy ) as a fat circle implying their cravings for wealth in the form of donations from believers. The most important scientific aspect of the book was its allusion to extra dimensions. Such an idea was most revolutionary having regards to the fact that the book preceded H.G. Wells', The Time Machine ( dealing with the extra dimension of time ) by a whole decade. Whatever effect the Flatland had on scientific thoughts it remained a fact that the book had inspired many subsequent sequels in term of its subject matter. The latest creation was “ Flatterland – like Flatland, only more so” written by mathematical physicist, Ian Stewart in 2001 which deals with the possibilities of successively higher dimensions in our universe up to the tenth dimension. Despite all these latest developments, the principle that any beings or consciousness existing at a higher dimension can understand better and command a fuller view all of the lower dimensions but not vice versa always applies. The latest theory on the reality that we experience in our daily lives suggests that we are mere projections or images projected from a deeper or higher level of existence. Just like the shadows cast on the wall by our hands and fingers in the ever so familiar finger shadow game, we can create queer shapes of different animals without revealing the true appearance of our hands and fingers in the normal three dimensional format. The same could be true that our existing three dimensional appearance is a mere shadow projected from a deeper or higher level of existence. This is the speculation of the Holographic Model of the universe.
