After reading books about physics, I sometimes drive myself crazy trying to visualise spacetime in terms approaching the current conventions of quantum.
I start by remembering some of those discovery channel diving programmes. The ones which start with some poor sap with a camera on his head just bobbing up and down in the sea before commencing a dive. The camera repeatedly dips up and down through the surface of the water. I imagine it is a flat, dead calm sea, barely a ripple marring the pristine and endless expanse of water.
Dipping down - a silver sheet, luminous - bobbing back up - a dull grey sheet lit through with sparkles.
Dipping down, bobbing up. Dipping down, bobbing up. Down, up, down.
Then, I take away the sky above. And then, with more effort of will, I take away the water below that endless surface.
And I'm left with a sheet, infinitely thin, stretched out in all directions.
Sometimes, on the street, if you're walking without much inclination to actually stop and do anything here, you'll come across someone frying Lokma. Lokma is the Turkish equivalent of donuts. Tasty.
I imagine that infinite sheet cunningly folded and tucked until it looks like a donut. Except the shell is empty, and there is nothing outside of it either. In fact, the concepts of 'outside', and 'inside' do not apply. Edge effects are such bastards.
Now, I get up real close to my little torus and notice that it is full of holes. I always like the phrase 'full of holes' because it is fabulously silly. Imagine the reverse - Empty of fillings. Sounds like something a dentist would say. Anyway. Instead of a smooth surface, it's more like a hankerchief real up close - a network of threads - except, there are no threads, only the points at which they would of crossed, hanging mysteriously, all by themselves, without any spacial property whatsoever, save simply being.
Pretty damn boring.
I remember then, the paddle balls I used to play with when I was a kid. Bat the ball, ball fly away, ball whizz back, bat the ball. Faster faster blurring now. No ball now, no elastic, just a line, hanging in space, where before there was only a point. A dimension.
I wonder if anywhere apart from England has the game of conkers..? It's easy. First you get a stone, and find a Chestnut tree. You throw the stone and recieve something green and spiky. You peel it, carefully. Voila, conker. Except it's only half a voila, a voi. You have to stew it in vinegar, and, if you're a sneaky SOB, fill it with concrete and red-brown powder-paint. Finally, you drill a hole in it and thread it through with good sturdy string.
Voila.
Now, gripping one end of the string (the unconkered end obviously) spin it. Round and round on a flat plain. Faster and faster, harder and harder. Squint your eyes a little, and stare through the hazy kerratin bars of your eyelashes.
Where once there was a limp line, hanging from your fist, buzzes a disc. Two dimensions, where once there was one.
Ever played jump-rope..? Don't jump, or skip, just stand back and watch them, the pigtail duo, twirling that rope around between them, watch it arcing up, swooping around and down again. Screw it, let's stop mucking around, let's replace the little girls with two great strapping blokes with arms the size of continents. Let's give them a braided steel cable and tell them to make that sucker hum.
Imagine a ballon pinched out between two hands, taut. Is it that kind of shape..?
Three dimensions, from none, to one, to two.
Now I go back to my donut sheet, full of holes, empty of fillings, with its suspended points - each now dancing and jiggling and looping back and forth, and see how it is not a featureless plain, but a living, breathing thing crammed with endless forms most beautiful, written in light.
Which is about as far as I get without a headache.
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