CHENNAI: It was time for the ultimate battle; a battle between man and machine. The man and the machine were battling it out to get a chance to witness a battle between a supposed God and a superhuman. I had waited months for this; almost a year to be precise, and at midnight, it began.
I had moments where I conspired quitting. Maybe machines were taking over, I thought. But, in the end, my supposed advantages over the machine, motivation, and unprecedented brutality in a conscience-ridden state helped me, as I emerged victorious. Or, did I?
I had to book tickets to watch a movie I had been waiting to see months on end, Batman v Superman. When I finally did book tickets, and just before I could celebrate, I realised that I had booked tickets for the 3D version of the movie. I was disappointed, to say the least. We live in a 4 dimensional world – 3 spatial dimensions and 1 temporal dimension, and even an extra dimension if science – fiction were to be believed. In that case, why are we so apprehensive about three-dimensional movies?
I, for a second, thought that my abhorrence towards 3D movies might make me question our perception and existence of the universe; dimensionally speaking of course, but it didn’t. The answer was as simple as a layperson’s understanding of the Occam’s razor – the 3D movies that are made are just plain bad.
Like a 3D movie where a two-dimension plane is projected into a spatial third dimension, whatever you had read until now was just an unnecessary prediction of what is to come. I do like to indulge myself in some “meta-writing” every once in a while to satisfy my esoteric senses. Much like my need to create a layer that is non-existent, what if the universe had a penchant for the make-believe?
How many dimensions do we really live in? Proposed by Gerard ‘t Hooft, the holographic principle is a theory that suggests that the entire universe can be seen as two-dimensional information on the cosmological horizon. As the name suggests, it’s an another “it sounds like science-fiction but it’s real” theories; an absurd theory that scientists have been working on for years now, and if they’re to be believed, then we don’t live in a four (three)-dimensional universe, we live in a two-dimensional world where the third spatial dimension is a projection, therefore a hologram.
Even though scientists are far from finding proof for this seemingly absurd theory, it does make for an interesting hypothetical. If the believers of the maker are to be believed, then the maker seemed to have discovered three-dimensional filmmaking on a universal scale, 4 billion years ago.
Similar to Carl Sagan’s ‘pale-blue-dot’, thought experiments like these are reality checks to put our arrogances away and keep our egos in place; we are insignificant, and nature did, in fact, make a better 3D movie 4 billion years ago and we still have no idea that we are living in one.
To put things in perspective, if Truman Burbank from the Truman show were living in a three-dimensional TV show without him ever finding out, that’d be us. If our universe is in a way a simulation like the near perfect one we’re residing in, then the possibility of living in a Matrix doesn’t sound bad after all.
(When he isn’t writing, the creative producer with The Rascalas watches a lot of ‘cat videos’ on YouTube)