Death And Reincarnation In A Fractal Universe
Discrete Scale Relativity asserts that the Universe has an infinite hierarchical organization, that this hierarchy is stratified into discrete cosmological Scales (… Subquantum, Atomic, Stellar, Galactic, Metagalactic,…), and that all of the cosmological Scales are exactly self-similar to one another. These are the three key principles of DSR.
We are biological organisms made up of trillions upon trillions of atoms and molecules. We would like to live forever, but death is inevitable. When we die we gradually decompose into our constitent atoms and molecules, and that is usually what we think of as the end of the matter. Discrete Scale Relativity says something quite different.
According to DSR, the trillions upon trillions of particles, atoms and small molecules that once made us are fully equivalent to neutron stars, main sequence stars and multiple star systems. We have trouble recognizing this because their Atomic Scale size and time scales are so astronomically small compared to anything we can readily imagine. To be exact they are 520,000,000,000,000,000 times smaller.
Some of those trillions upon trillions of atoms that once were us will enter the waters of the Earth, and the atmosphere. Some will escape the Earth entirely and wander interstellar space-time. If a lithium atom from our bodies were to escape Earth and be excited by a series of photons with just the right energies, then that atom could become an exact analogue of the Solar System.
Imagine a much more massive atom that once was within a person was floating in interstellar space-time and was struck head-on by an extremely high-energy photon, or accreted too much mass/energy in any number of ways. The atom could undergo a catastrophic event that tears the atom apart into its subatomic and subquantum constituents. Discrete Scale Relativity would say this extreme ionization event is equivalent to a Stellar Scale supernova, or what we call the Big Bang that created the observable universe.
When we die, DSR says we do not leave the Universe; in a sense we rejoin the Universe, not as a single individual on one Scale but as a vast number of systems on many Scales. Some of those systems could be exactly self-similar to the Solar System, others could be entire universes in the making.
These are big ideas, and perhaps they are a little scary. But these ideas will have to be confronted because they, or similar ideas, are coming and they cannot be ignored forever.
Toward the end of “2001 A Space Odyssey” the surviving astronaut enters the monolith/stargate and experiences something he cannot adequately describe. But I think I remember him saying something like: ‘It’s full of stars!” At the time I did not fully understand what Arthur C. Clarke (a lover of fractals) was getting at, but maybe now I see an interesting possibility. Perhaps Clarke intuited a radical transition from the Stellar Scale to the infinity of lower cosmological Scales.
At any rate, Discrete Scale Relativity offers a new, and quite different, way to think about where we come from, about our temporary existence in a Stellar Scale system, and about what happens when we rejoin the the Universe on an infinite number of lower Scales.
