“College
transported me to a new town, where I tried, one more time, to reinvent myself.
Becoming someone new, I could correct the errors of my past. At first I was
optimistic; I could pull it off. But in the end, no matter where I went, I
could never change." - Haruki
Murakami
I have always been the one for change. Often stuck in
time and place, I have longed for not even better things just things to be
different…but over the years whenever I have changed places, situations and
people, I seemed to have stayed the same… People say that cells regenerate and
after every seven years all the cells in one’s body are replaced, so does that
mean the person stays the same? It is this same question poised and explored in
a film called the “Ship of Theseus” (a must watch!). Theseus' paradox is
whether an object that has all of its components replaced remains fundamentally
the same object or does it become something else…I don’t have an answer, in
fact I don’t seem to have an answer for a lot of things these days, so I
thought instead I would just ask questions…why not right?
Another thing has
bothered me for quite some time is the fact that I can’t be objective about any
situation or person, I would always try to relate in a more personal way to
them and my opinions about people and situations are often tainted by my
personal thoughts and feelings…and I suddenly remembered the thought experiment
I had read about electrons wave-particle duality), I guess in the 11th
standard in school…a simple set-up with a gun that shoots electrons at a wall
having two tiny slits that can be either opened or closed. Once they pass
through the slit, or slits, the electrons would hit a detector. The experiment
explained how if a single slit were opened the electrons would behave like a
particle but if two slits were open, then the electrons would form interference
patterns (light and dark fringes, depending on the fact when the waves add to
the wavelength or the regions where peaks and troughs would overlap to cancel
each other creating alternating patches of light and dark areas)
characteristics of light waves. I was fascinated with this idea. Can we ever
know something absolutely by itself because the observer would always change
the object! Amazing!
So the question is do we
really change over time and if we do, how we measure it? What if the reference
point no longer exists?
