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Wednesday, 11 September 2002

The universe is a coincidence ::

So I’m testing the code that generates the links to IMDB and Amazon when you click on the hyperlinks to media titles here ... I click on Waking Life, then notice IMDB links to Amazon where I can buy it. I click. The Amazon page tells me I may also be interested in these items: Memento, which I just mentioned the other day, and Amelie, which I was just reminded of by my friend Justin’s web diary two days ago - he lists it as his all-time favorite movie and I was thinking I wanted to see it again. It’s full of *funny* coincidences. Finding it in IMDB required recognizing the French title which is much better: Le Fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain.

I’m engulfed in this swirling sense that everything is far more connected than we usually perceive and wondering whether it is madness, a glimpse of a more objective reality, both ... or whether it’s because I went to bed at 10 pm and am writing this after having woken up at 2:45 am in a disoriented haze.

I’m thinking of books that elborate on this: Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum, The Illuminatus Trilogy. In both, people get obsessed with the idea that everything is more connected than it appears, even seeking to disprove what they’ve found as “mere” coincidence, only to find yet more strange coincidences.

How could truth be even stranger than these works of fiction?!

(Title of first reader review of Foucault’s Pendulum: Divine Madness.)

I’m Googling, trying to find a vaguely remembered quote about the universe being even stranger than we can imagine. “Time, Space Obsolete in New View of Universe” refers to Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe, which I read last year.

Was it Einstein? A sermon by Hans C. von Baeyer to Unitarian Universalists starts with an Einstein quote that is in my random email signature collection:

“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed.”

– Einstein

More Einstein quotes from this page:

“The individual feels the futility of human desires and aims and the sublimity and marvelous order which reveal themselves both in nature and in the world of thought. Individual existence impresses him as a sort of prison, and he wants to experience the universe as a single, significant whole.”

“In my view, it is the most important function of art and science to awaken this [cosmic religious] feeling and keep it alive in those who are receptive to it.”

References:
The Holographic Universe (26 September 2002)

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