Physicists are killing the dream of suicide

Square, Cube, Tesseract
 "the tesseract is to the cube as the cube is to the square"

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I'll be straight up with you, Dear Readers.  I've been suicidal.  No, not mushy-mushy "suicidal ideation," give your belongings away trite and tripe, but stone-cold "I feel nothing compels me to stop any longer" days and nights.  Because anyone with a bad case of CRPS for longer than, say, three years, thinks about suicide every morning they are unlucky enough to wake up.  Morning, afternoon, evening, whatever.  And three years is equally arbitrary.

This is when I'm supposed to tell you what stayed my hand.

Except that nothing has.  It hovers, instead, shaking in midair.

Not even the usual stuff could stop me now.  That being::  the accrual of sufficient funds to support Fred in his final years, as he winds and wends his way around the grounds of these grand Haddock Family holdings. That being:  teaching him (or Sven, Bianca, or maybe even the Cabin Boy) to clear the kitchen counters, do the dishes, and put everything back in its place once clean and dry.  That being: paying off my debts so that my departure is not the kerplunk of a tiny pebble in our moat, but the gentlest surface addition of a dandelion parachute and seed, a complement to the naturally accruing muck of the moat.  Only I would think to think "Ah, le futur du dent de lion..."  But I have been neither perennial nor herbaceous.

That being:  the desire to know how things turn out for my family members and the people who fell into my gnobby spider's web and became my friends.

The old concerns of the novitiate died with my solemn vows -- I don't care who has to find me, who has to do the cleaning up, who has to make a phone call or two.  It's not that difficult, and no soul known to me would be shocked.  The even older concerns of the narcissist don't keep the heart contracting, the thought of how some would be hurt, some insulted, some angry, some mildly disappointed.  Will the truth of my life come out, every secret, every fault, every unknown success?  I murdered narcissism about a decade ago, with lapses, true, but that's no longer the darkest stain on my soul.  (The secret to getting out most organic stains is the oxygenating action of hydrogen peroxide.  And, by the by, an excellent help to CRPSers out there with feet that make passers-by cringe in revulsion?  One cup hydrogen peroxide and one cup Epsom Salts, diluted to an amount that seems practical.  Oh, but first take a handful of pain meds, say 25-40 minutes beforehand, because the use of an old toothbrush is required.  If someone really loves you, they'll do that part while you smack some gum and watch "Duck Soup.")

Again, what has my hand jangling so in a jello-shimmy just short of suicide, since nothing has changed the sieve envy of my mind?  Mine own anger, that's what.  Not yours, the possessive referring to none of you, Dear Readers, but the "yours" that designates the Usual Suspects, more precisely, the You the eye and mind of Keyser Söze would flit upon, briefly, not to concoct a credible story, but as the world's best annihilator of essence, a succubus of haloed ringlets of shades, lengths, and quality to rival Joseph's ridiculous coat, a precision parser of your particular sentence.  Everything is a circle, isn't it?

So now I must pretend.  Pretend that that is not my hand jazz dancing near hot flame, that that is not furor lighting up mine eyes, but joy at seeing you again.

It's nothing to do with being happy or not, or any other sentient commonplace.  I've explained, even, that it is not self-pity.  I recognize that there are people who suffer beyond my wilds.  I am sorry for them and do what I can, when I can, to alleviate their situation -- though usually that alleviation is so abstracted it will do the individual inciting it no good whatsoever.

I can see the goddamned glass is half full.  Three-quarters, even, if you press me, and if we can chat physics and the effects of modifying the shape of the eye's boundary.

Fred delights in the notion of a holographic multiverse.  Would you believe that I find most succinct the explanation given by the Physics section of About.com?  (Especially in comparison to the hair-raising versions Fred blurts out as he rocks in the green rocker by my bed!)  Here! I've stolen some of "About"'s explanation:

The holographic principle is a mathematical principle that the total information contained in a volume of space corresponds to an equal amount of information contained on the boundary of that space. This dependence of information on surface area, rather than volume, is one of the key principles of black hole thermodynamics.  

In Brian Greene's 2011 book The Hidden Reality, he suggests a tightly interlocked Holographic Multiverse:

the holographic principle envisions that all we experience may be fully and equivalently described as the comings and goings that take place at a thin and remote locus. It says that if we could understand the laws that govern physics on that distant surface, and the way phenomena there link to experience here, we would grasp all there is to know about reality.

Now, here is where "About" dumbs it down, and pretty much says what Fred, a-rockin', also says, but degarbled. Speech going back and forth in space, combined with smug glee, is not conducive to teaching. The sound is aimed all over the darned place, distorting the waxy protective vernix of my immature comprehension.

According to the holographic principle, there should be a physically-equivalent parallel universe that would exist on a distant bounding surface (the edge of the universe), in which everything about our universe is precisely mirrored.

What exactly does this mean?

Well, we live in a three dimensional universe. If you have a 3-dimensional region then the edge of that region would be a 2-dimensional surface. For example, if you have a solid rubber ball, the 3-dimensional object has a 2-dimensional spherical surface.

The holographic principle suggests that this surface would contain enough information to perfectly represent everything that takes place within it. Think of it kind of like a reflection on the surface (although this is only a useful analogy, the precise formulation of the holographic principle is a mathematical relationship based upon quantum physics).

If this highly-theoretical conjecture is true, then that means that our universe exists in two different forms, though those two universes are completely identical in every respect. As Brian Greene explains in his 2011 book, The Hidden Reality:

Our experiences here, and that distant reality there, would form the most interlocked of parallel worlds. Phenomena in the two - I'll call them Holographic Parallel Universes - would be so fully joined that their respective evolutions would be as connected as me and my shadow.

This is, in short, the origin of my anger.  I want to object, as if these worlds retained any proper respect for Robert's Rules -- using a diaphragm-controlled stage voice to call out, "Point of order!"  That would stop everything -- EVERYTHING -- until I could get everything -- EVERYTHING -- figured out.  Because my understanding, at this point, is that, while I may exist, how, where, when, and why I do has less force of impact than my dandelion fluff coalescing with our algae-rich moat water.

It seems that for my suicide to be a true thing, I must first strive to be one-dimensional, a pair of points whose surface has no dimension.

Rocking beside me a few days ago, happy as a clam, Fred marvels, to and fro, that we've found the Higgs boson and now he puzzles at its lightness.  Particle physics has gone red with the shame of its insufficiency to explain the 85% of matter that we cannot find, dark matter, and over the purple prose of the new fictive string in the narrative, that of supersymmetry, which posited an undiscovered doppelganger that is, for symmetry's sake, much heavier.  Elegant mathematics and no proof, string theory, and now... mucking up my suicide, extra dimensions, microscopic, and always, evidentiary failure of tests of "existing" models.

Fred sounds so content, excited.  Like one of those people who will live, old, bent, and aching within that contentment, and will greet death as a passageway, a chance to morph into some of that formulaic elegance, that chalk eeked out across green slate, erasable marker on white board, those old dreams, smashed to smithereens in search of God.

Physicists are killing the dream of suicide.


© 2013 L. Ryan