When God was deciding the shape of reality, he was deciding also about himself, and he decided to create a reality with a strong set of rules. Mathematical rules. He decided to be a mathematician. This, excuse the unintended pun, is odd.
Why create a reality with strong rules? Many people say it’s the only way to keep things interesting, but allow me to disagree, to strongly disagree: if that were true, it would be impossible to find an interesting Hollywood movie. To name just an example: I love the Ant-Man movies, but in them it’s clearly stated that he shrinks because the space between his atoms shrinks, not because every individual atom shrinks. So how can he get smaller than an atom? Despite so blatant a mistake, I find the journey to the quantum realm one of the most interesting parts.
This response is so common that we even have a name for it: suspension of disbelief.
So, if rules are not needed to create an interesting world, why enforce them? And why are they mathematical?
Before not answering that, we need to ask ourselves: what is math? Probably is just a word that designates our knowledge of how the world works. This is a way to say that in the beginning God decided to be a mathematician. But why? Why not a Hollywood actor? They live a much more desirable life.
Let’s pretend for a moment that God chose to be a Hollywood actor instead of a mathematician. Thus, the laws of the universe would have resembled those of Hollywood and not those of math. This would have created a parallel universe that we will call universe H from now on.
In universe H, math would have been forbidden, mentioned only in nonsensical technobabble or extremely dumbed down.
Let’s compare our universe and universe H. Same as ours, H must have a strong foundation, the basic laws of nature upon which the whole universe is built.
What are the most basic laws of nature? We have discussed this further on other post and the answer is (spoiler): set theory. It makes some sense: if in the beginning there was unity and the first thing created was diversity, the study of diversity should be the foundation of everything, right?
Right. But that’s what happens in this universe. But in universe H, I’m guessing screenplay theory lies on the foundation of everything.
What is screenplay theory? In the Hollywood universe, people lives are governed by scripts and they have their own rules, not too different from the usual algebraic rules. Let A be the script governing Bob’s life and B the script governing Alice’s life. Then we can define the following operations:
[tooltip tip=”The union of set A and set B is the set of all the elements that are a member of A or B or both. The union of {1, 2, 3} and {2, 3, 4} is the set {1, 2, 3, 4}”]A U B[/tooltip]: Romance movie
[tooltip tip=”The intersection of sets A and B is the set of all objects that are members of both A and B.The intersection of {1, 2, 3} and {2, 3, 4} is the set {2, 3} “]A ∩ B[/tooltip]: Cameo
[tooltip tip=”Set difference of A and B, is the set of all members of A that are not members of B. The set difference {1, 2, 3} \ {2, 3, 4} is {1}”]A \ B[/tooltip]: Love triangle movie
[tooltip tip=”The cartesian product of A and B is the set whose members are all possible ordered pairs (a, b) where a is a member of A and b is a member of B. The cartesian product of {1, 2} and {red, white} is {(1, red), (1, white), (2, red), (2, white)}”]A x B[/tooltip]: the trash pile of scripts that any producer worth his salt will never produce
[tooltip tip=”Power set of a set A is the set whose members are all of the possible subsets of A. For example, the power set of {1, 2} is { {}, {1}, {2}, {1, 2} }”]P(A)[/tooltip]: Comic books alternate universes
There are other laws in our universe, and they seem pretty important. One of the most famous is the second law of thermodynamics. As you surely remember, the second law states that entropy always increases and this implies that time always goes in one direction, we must grow old and die and our rooms are difficult to tidy up.
In our universe, a little known scientist named Clausius discovered the rather obscure concept of entropy. In universe H, an even less known scientist discovered an even more obscure concept with which the students there still struggle: box-office.
Box-office is a weird entity that governs every interaction between and within scripts. And it has only one rule: it always decreases. To put it in terms of a fake equation relating a fake universe and a real one,
entropy = – boxoffice
How is it possible? There are some movies that generate a huge amount of money. Yes, of course. And in our universe there are some processes that diminish greatly their own entropy; life, for example. But the cost is always the same: if one process reduces its entropy, it’s because another process in the universe increases it, so that the total amount of entropy always increases. Can you see the behaviour of box-office is very similar? If a movie makes a huge box-office, probably the rest of movies won’t, and the total box-office will always decrease a little because audiences get tired of watching the same old formula again and again.
By the way, audiences is a very arcane concept in universe H, only comparable to eleven space dimensions in ours. And, like our eleven dimensions, there’s no known empirical way to prove their existence.
We have already established the equivalents to set theory and entropy in universe H. The next question comes naturally: what is the equivalent to Newton’s laws? I’m gonna tell you with another fake equation relating the two universes:
Newton = [tooltip tip=”Syd Field wrote several books on how to create a salable screenplay. Among other things, he taught about the three-act structure of movies”]Syd Field[/tooltip]
Same as Newton describes how planets move, how apples fall from trees and how things slide down inclined planes, Syd Field describes how stories move, how scenes derive from structures and how characters muddle through rollercoasting plots.
But wait… Not everything goes as smoothly as once thought. It begins with a script theorist named [tooltip tip=”In our universe, Terry Rudolph is a renowned physicist and Schrödinger’s grandson”]Terry Rudolph[/tooltip] who observes how broken glass is sometimes magically fixed; for example, in Terminator 2, the model T-1000 head-butts his way into an helicopter, but a few moments later the hole in the windshield disappears. Same thing happens in Spiderman, this time with broken windows. These things were normally shrugged away as continuity goofs in the past, but our theorist thinks there is something else involved. He poses a question: in a 1949 Tom & Jerry cartoon, [tooltip tip=”The cat”]Tom[/tooltip]dies and goes to heaven, but he is sent back to Earth so he can obtain [tooltip tip=”The mouse”]Jerry[/tooltip]’s forgiveness. The question is simple, but no one has answered it yet satisfactorily: is the cat dead or alive?
