A relativistic perspective
Posted on November 30, 2006
Filed Under All, Taking Faith, My Brain |
One of the interesting things about current events at gulker.com, is how a relatively overwhelming life event distorts one’s perspectives. It’s sort of like Einstein’s relativistic events close to the event horizon of a singularity. Little things can take on enormous, distorted importance, while big issues are dismissed as a nit. For example, a small frustration, normally a blip in the noise of day-to-day existence, becomes a trigger for a full 3-year-old style meltdown by a 55-year-old man.
Time becomes strange, passing glacially at moments (e.g. while stuck in an MRI machine) or blasting past so quickly you barely know what just happened (the period from first diagnosis to surgery to today). Linda and I both have had our share of these events, recently.
I understand perfectly, rationally, what has happened to me: I also understand it from the perspective of my faith. It’s as if I have a kind of quantum duality of understanding of this brain tumor. A thing can be both a particle and a wave, depending on how you look at it in quantum theory. My tumor is both a possible, but relatively low probability event in the realm of macro physics, and a consequence of free will granted by a Creator I can’t pretend to understand.
I can’t pretend to understand quantum physics, either. So both trains of thought - rational, scientific Chris, and creature-of-faith Chris - merge at this singularity, the tumor, where things become very, very strange, regardless of which perspective you happen to take. Sometimes one helps me understand and make my way, sometimes it’s the other. It’s like quantum experiments with photons passing through a slit: sometimes it’s more helpful to look at them as quanta, other times as waves.
Either way, small things sometimes get big near the singularity: e.g., an unplanned event like trying to return a defective hard drive (as Linda and I did today between medical appointments) becomes an ordeal, even when the clerks are trying to be helpful. Time stretches, elongates, the event begins to overtake all of life at the moment. The reality was that it only took about 15 minute to return a failed LaCie 500 GB external HD at the Apple Store, and get a new one which, having been installed 2 hours ago, works great (and silently). Perhaps I should document these events and try to quantify the effects and consequences: I already have a small database on Google spreadsheets tracking my seizures and current meds dosages….
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