I have taken two pictures of the vastness of the universe.  both of them, conceptually, at least, came out of my own mind.  one is photoshopped.

http://jakethrockmorton.googlepages.com/galaxy-eynightseconddraft.jpg

and

http://jakethrockmorton.googlepages.com/P1020155.JPG

they each came into being simultaneously, and each try to convey the same idea.  they deserve some explanation.

I took the picture that makes the foreground of the nightscape on thursday night.  I was in the middle of a paper that I was writing for Guy Blaylock's conceptual quantum physics class and contemplating quite deeply the meaning of the EPR paradox and Bell's inequality as it relates to quantum entanglement and moreso as it relates to me.  Am I just a packet of information entangled with a photon speeding through the universe, set to coincidentally hit a machine that can teleport my state through entangled quantum teleportation, or is there a God?

I left the library having written one sentence, the first sentence, the most important sentence from which all else in the paper flows, utterly exhausted from the effort that it took.  I stopped in the dining hall and had a plate of chicken wings absentmindedly, as I wrote more on my laptop about what little I understand of quantum physics.  I left, intent on finishing my paper.

And then, I saw the rock.

I've been living in Sylvan for 8 or 9 months now, depending on how you count it, and for about half of that time that rock, a boulder resting about ten feet above the path on the way to the dorms, wasn't covered by snow and was therefore accessible.  Despite its near-constant accessibility for the last 2 months, I'd never noticed it like I did around 11:30 on Thursday night.
 
I whipped my camera out and positioned it on the rock, aiming it down toward Lederle, catching most of the northern part of campus in one shot.  That shot is the foreground of the nightscape.  I took many more pictures that night, but that one was the most usable.

I went up after about an hour and settled in to finish my paper, which I did within 2 hours.  I'll probably get an A on it.  I had a job interview the next morning for a summer job in physics education, an awesome job involving the creation of nanotechnology education videos, and I didn't want to be half-asleep for it.

I had the oddest dream that night, the implications of which I've been coping with ever since.  It was about the number two, which I represented in my mind as 2 boxes.  Through some sort of mitosis-like process, these two boxes were squared, then cubed, so that I had a 2x2x2 cube.  Happy at that, I decided that there was no limit here, that I wasn't bound by experience in my ability to abstract what the next power would look like, so I then visualized 2^4.

It looked strange.  The simplest description is that of two identical cubes, each at the end of a 4th dimensional line, which I knew enough to abstract as time.  I was now, I identified, looking at 16 unit^3-seconds.  This wasn't so hard to imagine; it simply put an object's temporal dimension into a visual abstraction, allowing for instantaneous viewing of several moments of its existence.

I kept going.  2^5 abstracted as something that I lack the original language to describe.  Width, in time, has been long-covered by science fiction writers:  it contains the different things that could be happening now if the past were different.  so here I was, looking at 4 states of the same cube; an earlier version and later counterpart in one dimension, one parallel history of the 2^3 cube, and another earlier and later state, with a different set of circumstances that came before.

I was dreaming, so the theta waves massaged my brain into believing all this.  In fact, I was comfortable.  So comforable that I proceeded to 2^6.  Not unfamiliar territory, because it looked enough like 2^5, and has a subtle difference.  On this set of time axes, 2^6 is a cube, not a square, and a cube allows for diagonal travel.  I was seeing, in the same image, 4 1-dimensional timelines of this cube, but not only those lines, but the lines between them.  Here, almost, is where language breaks down in its ability to describe these abstractions.  3-dimensional time and 2-dimensional time are different, but it is hard to describe how.

A Mobius loop, in space, can be best represented by a strip of paper that is twisted an odd number of times with its ends taped together.  Casual examination will reveal to the casual scientist that this object, for all intents and purposes, is one-dimensional, though it exists in 3-dimensional space.  It has only one side, and only length, if the width of the sheet is ignored.  

A Mobius loop in time elucidates the difference between 2-dimensional time of the 2^5 abstraction and the 3-dimensional time of the 2^6 abstraction.  Just as a Mobius loop in space can't exist in 2 dimensions because it couldn't be twisted, the horrible-to-think-of temporal Mobius loop could only exist in 6-dimensional spacetime, where 2^6 could be best represented as a 64 unit^3 second^3 hypercube.

I kept abstracting upwards in this dream.  However, past the above points, words cannot describe what I saw, and if better physicists than me have thought of such words, then I do not understand them enough to duplicate them.  I arrived at a 2^8 megasquare and promptly dreamt about something else.

Come morning, these abstractions temporarily flew from my mind as I prepared myself for the job interview with Professor Tuominen.  Nanotechnology research sure as hell beats the shit out of the Border Cafe for summer employment, so when I heard about this job I jumped at it.  

Walking out of his office a couple of hours later, feeling somewhat ambiguous, I went to Professor Blaylock's lecture, which I, a thousand years ago, had done a paper for.  The dream begun to nag at me, but didn't have time to take hold before Blaylock put on the screen the single most fascinating picture of the sky that I had ever seen.  

He identified it as the Hubble Ultra Deep Field survey (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_ultra_deep_field), a picture of a seemingly empty region of the sky that, in a picture taken over the course of a year, contains about 10,000 galaxies, and by my count, 6 visible stars.  The scope of this snapshot of celestial history shocked and awed me into forgetting almost completely about the number 2.  I did forget about it, until class ended, anyway.

During lecture, Professor Blaylock explained the concept of John Wheeler's delayed-choice experiment, an experiment involving sending light through a beam splitter and deciding before the light would hit another one whether the second beam splitter should be placed or not, making the apparatus an interferometer or not.  Statistically, the results of this experiment point inequivocably to one conclusion.  Not only does the presence of the second beam splitter alter the path of the photon beam in the future, it alters it in the past, as well.  Until the lights hits the delayed-in-being-placed beam splitter, or not, the path of the light to the detectors is undefined; it can be said to have taken both paths.  However, if the beam splitter is placed and the light makes it through to a detector, by nature of the experiment it could only have taken one path.  The inevitible conclusion is nonlocality in time.

This took me a few moments to grasp, but I subconsciously tied it to the dream that I had had the night before.  Instinctively, I asked Professor Blaylock when I could meet him in his office to discuss the thoughts running through my mind, which were slowly increasing in speed and intensity.

Mandy tagged along and we waited outside Blaylock's office, looking at pinned-up newspaper articles about the LHC at CERN.  As always, we discussed what would be said to the Professor so that we wouldn't waste his time.  I told Mandy about my dream; she kind of got it.  She responded with a comment on Wheeler's experiment:  if, by Special Relativity, things that go the speed of light, namely photons, do not experience the effects of time, why should it matter when their wave function is collapsed?  They certainly don't care.  In essence, she was saying, we can't see the wave collapse of a photon from our reference point.  A photon's reference point, being independent of time, exists in a collapsed state, because its end is the same as its beginning.

Blaylock arrived, and I started talking.  I don't recall precisely what I said, but I conveyed my philosophical confusion with quantum mechanics, relating Schrodinger's cat, Wigner's friend and Wheeler's delayed choice experiment, along with the reference point paradox that Mandy had brought up in the hall, all into one great, grand question, which was, "Does collapse have to happen in a single, well-defined moment in time?"

Professor Blaylock, the single smartest human being that I know and who knows my name as well, took a slight breath and  said, simply, "Good!"

Apparantly I had hit on something.  He insisted that he had no answer for me, but gave me several key terms to search on if I wanted to read further on the philosophical ramifications of what I was saying, but I knew that I had reached the best logical solution, and it bolstered me into unknown territory.  So I brought up the dream.

He sat there in silence as I drew, to the best of my ability, the first 6 dimensions in terms of 2.  As I did so, I became slightly wild-eyed and overcome with the ramifications of it, finally.  When I explained to him that I could see beyond 6 but couldn't describe it, he said that I was very close to String Theory, which contains 10 or 11 dimensions, depending on whom you ask.  He then conveyed to me the single strangest cautionary tale that I'd ever heard.

A woman that he knew had once taught a graduate student who claimed to be able to see, or imagine, or visually abstract, if you will, 9 or 10 dimensions.  He understood the math and could see it, so he was well on his way to becoming a prominent string theorist.  However, he cut himself short by jumping out of a window before he received his Ph.D..

Meanwhile, I was slowly going more and more mad, just sitting there, seeming calm, though excited with myself.  I don't know if he sensed my difficulty coping with the burden of such an imagination, or if he thought that it was a morbidly funny story worth sharing, but it helped.

Mandy and I thanked him for his time and left, and went to eat.  Needing a moment of quiet to draw what was in my mind, I handed Mandy my computer and told her to read this story off of the SomethingAwful forums called "A Bomb in the Building," which related slightly to the lines I was drawing along, aside from being hilarious.  The link might not last, but: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=2819309

While sitting there, I drew the second picture that I linked way at the beginning of this post.  It made me feel better, slightly, but at this point I was so burnt out and tired from the sheer volume of thinking I'd been doing that day that I had a splitting headache.  I wanted to get the thoughts out before they went away.

A night passed, I suppose, though it felt like longer.  I was looking through the pictures that I had dumped off of my camera onto my computer and decided to create a picture of a more tangible infinity than the dimensional one, so I grafted a portion of the Hubble Deep Field Survey onto the sky of a picture that I had taken, the result of which, the reader, no doubt, has seen by now.  

One thing about the picture frustrates me, though.  Light in our atmosphere diffracts in a hexagonal pattern.  The 3 stars in that portion of the Hubble picture have their light diffracted in a square pattern, because there is no free hydrogen in the way of the Hubble, a space telescope.  The terrestrial lights and the stars don't match, and it frustrates me.  

This last afterthought, about, of all things, diffraction patterns of light through atmosphere and vacuum, convinces me, in addition to everything else that I've been thinking about over the last 2 days, that I'm a physicist, and am right to choose it as my major.

Yes, that's where all this was going.