By way of background for this blog:-
Lapis Lazuli asked some very interesting fundamental questions in her blog just recently as follows:
Where were you before you were born, where do you go after death. Please tell me what you think, not what they told you to think. Deep in your head you have your own opinion. Share it with me. You see, we have no proof. The closest of a proof is near death experience. In near death experience, the soul is still connected to the body while the spirit got yanked out of the body. Because the soul is still connected, it is near death but not death.
How come we don't remember before birth, where do we come from. Who are we without a human body...It has generated and still is as of this present time generating a lot of responses.
My humble response was:
I've spent 40 years looking for the answers so far and I'm still working on it. The closest I've got is that I'm currently communicating with Einstien and Elvis. The last time I went to see a medium I was told that my grandfather was saying I needed a good slapping on the cheeks.
To which another reader Kim replied:
Okay...right off the bat..I want to talk to you Phil....your in touch with Elvis...OMG!!! :) Please tell him about me...lol....
She also said:
I believe with all my heart...our souls live forever...we never die. We may leave this vessel behind and rightly so for in some cases...it is not a good vessel...betrays us often. I believe we are pure energy. My own made up theory...let's call it *Kim's Theory* is if we knew what lay ahead waiting for us after death....we would never want to be here on earth. But sadly we need this life to progress....to further our growth. It is here that we learn, or shall I say progress and in some of our cases, digress. I believe when we leave here that the beauty we will experience will be indescribable....we cannot begin to fathom. I had a dream once...I experienced what true unconditional love was like....in it's purest state...and I wrote a story only the story seemed show shallow to me.....the words did not describe what I saw nor what I felt. Even the way that I communicated in this dream was so different, so unlike us. I spoke but not with words...with thoughts but with minds...looking into eyes.
It was the most moving experience I ever had...and to this day, I carry it close. I know that there is something greater for us....and I believe that once we arrive to whence we began....we will be once again home and once again...we will be loved.
I think Kim’s theory is lovely and I like it… I hope to what ever created us that it’s right!So back to my original question; why am I still talking to Elvis?
You could ask my psychiatrist at the Shanghai’s IDD (Institute for the Dangerously Deranged) but never mind his theory I’ll tell you why:-
It’s simple he was couriered to me in error by one of my Yahoo 360 blogging friends Sai. She was supposed to be sending Elvis back to another of her blogging friends Psychotic Dave. As a result I blogged about it last month in ‘You Dolt!’ – for her careless error I had called Sai a ‘trollop’ which became my careless error but that’s another story altogether.
You will see from this blog that I have ABSOLUTE proof that I am talking to Elvis with the LARGE photo of me and Elvis together. This was taken in Shanghai in December 2006. Some say that it don’t look like him – but hey don’t you know that they have better access to radical facial surgery on the otherside than here and if that’s the way Elvis wants to look these days who am I to stop him?
Besides, I have to frequently endure his frequent singing of the blues in the living room of our apartment and for that you will frequently find me hurling outrageous insults at the King and if it’s not to the King then it’s to my Moon… It may be because I’m shouting these insults rather than due to my claim that I’m still talking to Elvis that I’m seeing a psychiatrist at the IDD, I’m not really sure... hhmmm, it could even be because of my over frequent tendency to use the word frequently.
If you’re still not satisfied that I’m really talking to Elvis well then let me at least mention to you an article in today’s Daily Telegraph (a source from which I have plagiarized most of my blogs (well about two of them actually).
I was gonna plagiarized this one and make it my own Shining Glory but I’m well… you know with my testosterone levels on the rapid decline… I’ve developed an increasingly emotional side to my character and I’m still reeling from the hurt caused by the anonymous comment that had been made (you know I'm joking don't you?).
So here’s the article by Marcus Chown (what a name huh?) in TODAY’S (that’s 16th January 2007) Daily Telegraph.
It's official, Elvis lives
It might sound a little crazy, but our standard theories of cosmology and physics suggest that an infinite number of Presleys still exist, says Marcus Chown. And if that's not scary enough, it also means that you, and these words, are repeated ad infinitum across the universe
Elvis is alive. No, really! He didn't die of a cardiac arrest in his bathroom at Graceland on August 16, 1977. Instead, he slipped out of the back door under cover of darkness dressed as a nun, had a sex change and worked for several years in a gas station in Ohio. She/he has now retired, is living on the Gulf Coast and is in tip-top health. After all, she's still only 71.
Have I done a David Icke and gone conspiracy mad? Not at all. Elvis is alive and kicking, all right. Not here on Earth - but in an infinite number of other places in the universe. I have just revealed cosmology's dirty little secret – the thing the people who spend their time theorising about the universe rarely like to mention except in a whisper. And who can honestly blame them?
Elvis's survival turns out to be an unavoidable consequence of two things – the standard theory of cosmology and the standard theory of physics, "quantum theory". Take cosmology first.
According to the standard picture, the universe underwent a brief, super-fast period of expansion in its first split-second of existence. It goes by the name of "inflation". You don't need to know much about inflation – what drove it or why cosmologists believe it happened. You just need to know one thing: inflation implies the universe goes on for ever – it is effectively infinite in extent.
The universe we see through our telescopes, however, does not look infinite. Far from it. Everything burst into being 13.7 billion years ago in the explosion of the Big Bang, so we see only the galaxies whose light has taken less than 13.7 billion years to get to us.
Galaxies whose light would take, say 14.7 billion years, we don't see – their light is still on its way to Earth. For this reason, there is a "light horizon" around our bit of the universe and everything we can see within it we call the "observable universe".
But, just as there is more beyond the horizon at sea, there is more of the universe beyond its horizon. In fact, an infinite amount, according to inflation. Imagine our observable universe shrunk to the size of a soap bubble. Well, according to inflation, beyond our soap bubble are an infinite number of other soap bubbles, all similar to our observable universe.
It is easy to speculate on what it is like in the other bubble regions because we have a pretty good idea how the galaxies in the observable universe came to be. Some regions of the Big Bang fireball were ever-so-slightly denser than others. They acted as "seeds" for the growth of galaxies.
Specifically, they had stronger gravity than surrounding regions and so gathered in matter from about them. This made their gravity even stronger so they could pull in more matter. In a process akin to the rich getting ever richer, they gradually produced the galaxies like our own Milky Way and its neighbour, Andromeda.
Now, inflation is no airy-fairy theoretical idea. It has been pretty much confirmed in the past year by data collected by Nasa's "Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe", which is observing the dim "afterglow" of the Big Bang fireball from far out in space. And inflation predicts more than that – there are an infinite number of bubble regions like our observable universe.
It also predicts something else significant – that the seeds of galaxies were randomly scattered throughout the Big Bang fireball. Consequently, in the next soap-bubble region to our own, the seeds were different, which means that the history of that region was different, and the galaxies that formed were not the same as ours. And the same goes for the next region. And the next...
Though Elvis has not made a look in yet, don't worry, we're getting there!
The last thing you need to know to understand why the King still lives is that the universe is quantum. This means that, ultimately, everything comes in tiny, indivisible grains, or "quanta". Matter comes in indivisible grains. Time comes in indivisible grains. And so does space.
If we could look at space with some kind of super-microscope – way beyond the power of any instrument we can build today – it would resolve itself into a grid of tiny cubes. For the sake of simplicity, think of it instead as the two-dimensional grid of squares of a chessboard.
In this picture, we might have a galaxy-spawning seed of matter on one square, and another seed on another square; and so on. But, and this is the key, there are only a finite number of ways of arranging the seeds just as there are only a finite number of ways of arranging the pieces on a chessboard.
So there are only a finite number of possible histories for a universe leading to only a finite number of possible arrangements of galaxies.
If your head hasn't yet exploded, you now have all you need to understand the first paragraph of this article.
If there are an infinite number of regions like our observable universe but only a finite number of histories for such regions, then every possible history happens not once but an infinite number of times.
"There are an infinite number of places in the universe where Elvis is alive and kicking," says one of the contributors to inflation theory, Alex Vilenkin of Tufts University.
There are also an infinite number of places where Shane Warne was born in Surrey, and England never lose the Ashes. There are an infinite number of places where The Telegraph liked this article so much it decided to pay me a million pounds and run a special colour supplement solely to advertise my new book.
But all of this also has implications for you, not just Elvis and Shane Warne. There are an infinite number of regions in the universe exactly the same as the observable universe. And each contains a perfect copy of you who, up until this instant, has experienced everything you have ever experienced. This is no fanciful prediction.
"It is possible to calculate precisely how far away is the nearest region identical to our observable universe," says Vilenkin.
"It's 10^10^100 centimetres away." (10^100 is 1 followed by 100 zeroes, so I'll leave to imagine how "vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big" 10^ (10^100) is, to steal Douglas Adams's words. As an anorak aside, Google, the name of the ubiquitous web search engine, is a misspelling of "Googol", which means 10^100. There is even a name for 10^Googol – 1 followed by a Googol of zeroes. A "Googolplex"!).
And remember, the existence of your doppelgangers is an unavoidable consequence of our standard theory of cosmology and our standard theory of physics. Your doubles do not exist only if one or both of these theories is wrong, which very few physicists are – frankly - prepared to countenance.
I have a soft spot for this whole idea because, even if you think this is the dullest and most incomprehensible article you have ever read, I can console myself with the thought that, in an infinite number of other space domains, you were so impressed that you emailed it to every person in your address book and bought copies of my book for all your friends and family.
• Marcus Chown's book, 'The Never-Ending Days of Being Dead: Dispatches from the Frontline of Science' is published by Faber & Faber on 18 January, 2007 and is available for £13.99 (rrp £15.99) + £1.25 p&p. To order call Telegraph Books on 0870 428 4112Finally to our Kim mentioned early on in this blog; I hope I have sufficiently satisfied your insatiable appetite for news on your dearly beloved Elvis and that everything is now clear as mud to you.
Incidentally, for those of you who faithfully read the entire article above: well done! Did you notice how similar Marcus's sense of humour was to mine? Hey, just a minute! What if he's another me in disguise? Perhaps he's from another part of the universe where he in fact goes by the name Philip Turner and where he come's from the technology is so advanced he's able to go to many of the other places in this universe to sell his book... or is it my book? Oh hell this is frightening!!!
If you felt that any part of this blog was plagiarized there's a free helpline number you can call to report the crime: 800-666-PLAGUERIZE
Alternatively, if you feel you've found a crank please call Shanghai's IDD on 021-688861XX they have some very good psychiatrists who may be able to help him.
May the thing that's created us all bless you. Have a great day.
Phil....what can I say...wow..I am totally speechless. You know just this thing exactly is the beauty of 360 and the internet, sharing ideas. I watched a program this past year called What the Bleep do We Know...about just that Quantam physics...it was mind boggling to say the least and up until this minute, I didn't put two and two together. Elvis is alive....never died did he? It is hard to retrain our conditioned thinking processes to digest all this information but so, so very interesting and intruiguing.
You have truly made my day...and thank you Phil, thank you very kindly for posting such a lovely, comedic and informative blog. By the way, I awoke this morning, made my coffee and came to get your message and I am happy to report, I am going to sit outside with my cup of coffee and share a moment or two with the King...just he and I and billions of other everlasting particles. I am thinking that Winston Churchill may show up for a cup also!
Reading the Telegraph article I get the impression a number of quantum physicists must have read the same comics that I did when I was a boy. Now they are claiming credit for ideas they have stolen from the Justice League of America, and episodes of Star Trek and The Twilight Zone. Naughty quantum physicists!
Could parallel universes with multiple copies of us all truly exist? I’m not the man to ask...but it does strike me that that kind of duplication of matter and energy seems terribly wasteful. Maybe there are no laws of energy conservation in the Multiverse? Hmmmm.
As I understand it these alternate universes are constantly splitting off from the main branch. Every time I turn left instead of right an alternative universe where I did go right springs into existence. And the alternate universes would spawn yet more realities as our duplicates made their own decisions. If that were true I wonder what the point of that might be in the larger scheme of things? What does it say about my place in the universe if I don't know if I'm the original or the economy pack. My gut reaction to all this is that it makes great Sci-Fi but I just don't believe it is true - I truly believe that I am unique, as is the world - the universe even - that I live in.
Roo & Sci-Fi Janet, thanks for the comments. Sorry i'm late in replying. I agree that it does seem wasteful to have such duplication in the multiverse. It bothers me that we seem to be able to invent maths fo fit any kind of behaviour. Scientists always get excited when they are able to get consistent results for a theory from at least two completely independent ideas. Now they are getting excited because they can look at the map of the big bang after-glow and create some interesting maths that predicts that there must be an infinite number of universes similar to ours and since there are an infinite number then there must be some that are absolutely indentical which leads to the logical conclusion that we also exist elsewhere.
It's a totally ridiculous thought that only seems acceptable when we think of infinity as a reality. We live in a life where everything seems to have a beginning and an end, so infinity is not a concept that we can really ever fully appreciate.
Even though one might predict that the next nearest identical universe is only 10^10^100 cm away, that only says that the matter arrangement in that universe might be identical to ours. May be even life would evolve on an identical earth and create humankind in exactly the same way. But have not scientist shown that even if our make up from one human to another is 99.99% identical (say as in identical twins) each twin has completely independent thoughts that are totally different from each other.
Thus I agree with Sci-Fi Janet that we are still very unique. Until that is you start looking at an infinite number of these identical universes... something that our tiny finite minds cannot ever really appreciate.
i checked through deductive reasoning... U R Not Marcus Chown... U'r Accents are different.. However, lurking around in this endless internet society, i did come across an interesting idea that maybe U'r name isn't really Phil Turner...
I think it is conseQuently PAGE Turner .....
Right yeah... I've just spoken with the King and he says it's himself! He says he's dead alive! That's why he's joined my Dead Bird Society.
Saturday 3 February 2007 - 02:42AM (GMT)
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