I had a thought and decided to write it down. Welcome to the rantings of someone who decided to write down his thoughts on mysticism, politics, anthropology, science, and art.

Sunday, January 23, 2011

Impossibility of Visual Synchonicity

Dream Theater, one of my favorite bands, has one album that I consider to be the nexus of all their album  Metropolis Part 2 : Scenes From A Memory (although most albums that apply to this nexus album follow MP2 : SFaM, though a few albums prior to it do still link to it). One particular piece of evidence is in the first song on the album, the song "Regression" :

"Hello Victoria, so glad to see you my friend".

The next song, "Strange Deja Vu" has the following lyrics :

"There's a room at the top of the stairs.
Every night I'm drawn up there.
And there's a girl in the mirror.
Her face is getting clearer"

To give some background, SFaM is a single story of love, murder, hypnotherapy, past life regression, and strangle loops. The main character Nicolas is being haunted by a girl in his dreams, a girl named Victoria. Victoria is him in a past life. The girl in the mirror is Victoria, so what he sees in the mirror is his past.

The former set of lyrics is reused on their album Train of Thought in the song "This Dying Soul" :

"Hello mirror, so glad to see you my friend.
It's been a while."

"This Dying Soul" was written by Mike Portony about recovering from alcoholism, because he was an alcoholic, and it is number two of five songs written about recovery from alcoholism ("Glass Prison", "This Dying Soul", "Root of All Evil", "Repentance", and "Shattered Fortress", and each song is broken into movements so that there are twelve movements in all, as there are twelve steps for recovering from alcoholism). What these lyrics refer to is the past seen in there mirror, namely his past as an alcoholic.

But the mirror always reflects the past. Always. Consider the Mitch Hedberg joke :

"A guy hands me a picture of himself and says, 'Here's a picture of me when I'm younger'... Every picture is of you when you younger!"

But every reflection of yourself in the mirror is of you when you're younger. I'm reaching into Einstein's relativity here, but there is a certain amount of time it takes light travel across a certain distance (assume that we are not moving, because if we were on a moving train that only complicates matters). So there is an x amount of time it takes for light to bounce off your face towards the mirror, and then bounce off the mirror into your eyes. Then there is a certain amount of time it takes to your eyes to process the information, encode it, send it to the brain, and for the brain to decode it. Albeit all of this time is very minuscule and negligible, but there is a certain amount of time that elapses in this time period, which is dependent on the distance from the mirror (as well as, if applicable, how drunk you are).

So the reflection in the mirror is always of the past, though a very recent past. But there is another implication to this theorem : you can never see yourself in the exact same instance in time as you are in currently. There is always a delay. So if you could see a neutrino pass through your face, the moment that it occurs isn't seen and processed in the brain until a minuscule fraction of a second later (assuming you're looking in a mirror and that neutrinos are visible).

The past is the only thing that can be seen ever, so visual synchronicity is impossible; that is, so long as we live in an expanding universe. This all so happens to make M. C. Escher's Hand With Reflecting Sphere all the more fascinating, particularly in breaking the fourth wall.

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