Thursday, April 28, 2011

PARALLEL UNIVERSES, OTHER MEs & YOUs ......ASTROLOGY?

Snippet from an episode of TV documentary "The Universe"
Narrator: Even as you peacefully watch TV, whole other invisible worlds could be raging all around you.
Michio Kaku: These parallel universes are in your living room. This means that in your living room, there are dinosaurs. You can't hear them, you can't see the dinosaurs that are rampaging throughout your living room, but they're there.
Narrator: The quantum principle that creates many versions of each person can also create entire universes.

Michio Kaku: The universe, at one point, was actually smaller than an electron. If that's true, and if electrons are described by being many places at the same time in parallel states, this means that the universe also exists in parallel states, you inevitably get parallel universes. There's no choice


Full piece at: http://www.tv.com/the-universe/parallel-universes/episode/1236985/trivia.html

We watched a VHS tape of a 1999 Australian movie: Me Myself I recently.
It's really just a bit of fanciful fluff, I guess, but enjoyable. What drew me to the storyline was the alternate/parallel universe theme. That theme is used at its most simplistic level in the movie, with no real explanation of the hows or whys.

Plot in a nutshell: thirty-something woman, a serious journalist, unmarried, bored or disgusted by the men she meets, living in chaotic near-squalor feels despondent enought to want to commit suicide by standing in a bath of water with hairdryer in hand. Just as she switches it on a thunderstorm erupts and the power is cut off.

Shortly after, while crossing the street she is hit by a car whose driver is....herself. She is confronted by yet another version of herself as she recovers. This version of her is married with three children. Married to the boyfriend the original version of her turned down over 13 years ago.

The storyline follows the original journalist gal who is shunted into the life and lifestyle of her alternative version (and vice-versa, we find out later on).

It's not hard to imagine, without further help, the often funny, sometimes serious difficulties the gal encounters in her strange, alternate lifestyle with husband and children.

Two minor things I noted:
1) That scene with the hairdryer and the bath - I've seen something like that in a movie before. Mel Gibson, in a movie called What Women Want, - after the electric shock he was able to hear women's thoughts.
2) The only person to realise that his new Mom was not his usual Mom was the youngest child - little boy aged 3-ish. The family dog, usually first to "smell a rat" in movies, seemed quite happy to accept this alternate version of his human food-handler.

The theme of parallel universe(s) has been thrown around quite a bit in movie-land and TV drama. Sliding Doors, Twice Upon a Yesterday, The Family Man are a few of many such movies. Current TV series Fringe is a good example of it handled on a slightly more scientific level, with some whys and hows thrown in - albeit fictional ones.

A thought occurs: would astrology still be valid if ever science proved that alternate universes do in fact exist - and there are indeed numerous versions of "us" living the astrological cycles but in different ways?

I don't see why astrology couldn't be equally valid. As long as different versions of "us" were born at exactly the same point in time, living through the same planetary cycles (if time existed!)

There are already many ways the contents of a natal chart can be interpreted. A simple example, taken from the story of the movie above: the woman as an unmarried serious journalist wasn't happy, felt unfulfilled yet needed her freedom. Her counterpart, married for 13 years, husband and family of three intact, writing fluff pieces for a woman's magazine was, we find later, not happy either. She was having an affair, fed up with her own life pattern. Similar feelings, different causes.

I see no reason why astrology, its cycles and alignments, wouldn't be valid in parallel-land. We'd all be under the same sky..... or would we? That is the question to which there is no answer. Knew I'd find one!

4 comments:

Gian Paul said...

If you deserve one more diploma in this life, Twilight, it's for being so genuinely curious!

The world has roughly 5 billion inhabitants today. That means that every hour around 8300 people are born, every day about 200'000.

So each one of us has around that number of "others" born in the world, the same hour, or the same day and year respectively.

I must make abstraction of the place and minute of birth, but mathematically this should balance out, so that each individual has, statistically, around 4000 "hour siblings" and 95'000 "day siblings" (astrologically speaking).

If, as per some ancient notion, a human being is indeed a microcosmos by itself, and my calculations are worth some consideration, this makes for quite an impressive number of microcosmoses that would only have to "link up" to make a considerable, homogeneous croud.

PS. Unable to drive right now, I told my driver just the other day (have to make some converstaion with him going to São Paulo) that he is not unique by any means: according to my mathematics about 8ooo other Brazilians (and just Brazilians that is) were born the same day than he. As he is a Leo, he had some difficulty at first to "swallow my information"...

Twilight said...

Gian Paul ~~~ I am, and unashamedly so, GP. ;-)

I've just spent the morning reading stuff that made my hair stand on end! Maybe more about that at some later date, when the hair has returned to normal!

Ah yes - you refer to all of our world-wide astrological twins? That's yet another side to the story.
Though, as in the case of Candy Barr and Dalai Lama (in an earlier post) there's not much obvious likeness to be found, due to environment, family circumstance, genetics etc etc etc.

Wisewebwoman said...

I've often pondered this exact same thought, T. We are certainly not alone, and even the brightest of scientists and astronomers can't count the universes that surround us.
The influence of the stars on all our 'twins' is immeasurably. We are all stardust.
XO
WWW

Twilight said...

WWW ~~~ Yes. If we knew even a fraction of what there is to be known we'd probably freak out!
;-)