Cones

Light cone confinement--I'm feeling it acutely. Minkowski spoke about it way back at the beginning of the twentieth century, but only now is it beginning to sink in (with me.) What disturbs is not only the feeling of entrapment (they are big these cones extending into the past and future, but I'd rather infinity), but also a linked notion I've recently read about that, while my cones and yours may overlap almost completely, my includes my frames of reference, yours includes yours, and so our physics are ultimately incommensurable: we live in different universes.

(Light cones, by the way, are causal cones that represent the maximum distances (based on the speed of light) from which influences could have come to affect our past, and the maximum distances (based on the same considerations) to which our influence can extend. Nothing can cause anything to happen faster than light can travel. )

What am I in a swivet about? I've been reading Trespassing on Einstein's Lawn, fascinating, rigorous, informative (about contemporary controversies in speculative physics and cosmology), strange (why would the author substitute references to parts of female anatomy when reviewing Galileo's cannonball/feather experiment?).  Her mission: to establish that the universe is actually nothing seen from the inside, its form (illusory) consisting of the horizons created by observers.  Her 2nd person partner in this: her dad who inspires his journalist daughter.

I as observer, you as observer each our individual cones, each with our individual frames of reference, are in what way linked, according to this notion? Of course, we can and do influence each other, but does my status as participant in my frame of reference mean I'm only an observer of yours? The paradox of self-knowledge (how can I know myself knowing?) is at the heart of the problem. Toggling between participating and observing, however, is something we are all familiar with; we don't need physics to tell us.

A friend recently left me (many thanks!) a passage from John Berger's Understanding a Photograph to think about. It's a discussion of the authority of stories: 'The discontinuities of the story and the tacit agreement underlying them fuse teller, listener and protagonists into an amalgm, an amalgam I would call the story's reflecting subject (his italics)...If this sounds unnecessarily complicated it is worth remembering for a moment the childhood experience of being told a story.  Were not the excitement and assurance of that experience precisely the result of the mystery of such a fusion? You were listening. You were the story. You were in the words of the storyteller. You were no longer your single self; you were, thanks to the story, everyone it concerned (his italics).'

Is story then the way we burrow into each other's light cones or do our separate frames of cosmological reference prevent from really participating in each other's stories? What kind of story emerges from the stacking up of individual universes generated by individual observers?

The space I'm interested in is encounter space where two can meet and address each other as 'You.' This is certainly participatory, as well as the basis of entanglement, so does it link both? And you, everlasting lovers whose romance underwrites encounter space, have you a place in either account?

So much to think about, and as I do, a person stops in my classroom for directions to the North End, and another drops in for advice on improving her ability to express her ideas, and another passing by on her way home suggests we take the train together. Encounters drop on me like the leaves that even tonight have fallen all over my porch, yellow, curled, perfectly distributed and beautiful. They're all beautiful.