I am a worm too...

I am a worm too... G'Day time travelors!

You h-a-v-e been traveling in time since the last post - eh? Remember our amoeba/wafer/worm friend who was slowly changing awareness-slices at the surface of the water as the rain slowly filled his 50 gal drum universe? How about you... are you a worm? Before you can start to wriggle around in time you need to figure out what carrot slices of youself would be like.

Alright. Here we go... take your hand and place it in front of you while making a victory V with your pointer and middle fingers. Use a microscopic double-bladed Samurai sword to remove a thin slice across those 2 fingers and pop them into a vat of nutrient solution so that they stay alive... aw come on! Ain't ya got no imagination??? OK, this seems a bit too barbaric, so, use some kind of Star trek transporter slicer to make a copy of each slice instead.

After a split second, take another pair of slices and stack them on top of the others. Supposing our copier allows us to keep doing this, what do we end up with in the vat? Right! 2 worms! Each new slice attaches to the previous slice and we would get worms just like our amoeba friends worm. If we take slices in more places, how many worms could we get? If we did a Plank length minimum slice we could get billions! If we slice closer to the base of the V, we would get an odd worm with 2 round lobes and a thin fleshy membrane connecting them. If we slice through our torso we would get a great big oval worm (some people have bigger torso worms than others!) Having any luck visualizing this? Give it some time. (They have actually done this sort of thing with cadavers "frozen in time" see 1 and 2 below to help visualize this. Remember that all of those slices are frozen at one time while ours are the same slice over and over at different times.)

What good is a 3D worm that can't move??? Remember how we allowed the flatland amoeba to move by stacking his carrot slices not quite straight? Lets do that with our finger worms. Before we make our next slice, we are going to move our hand slowly and then attach the new slices onto the worms offset to the side just the same tiny amount. Again, assume the worm can just seem to bend. As your hand moves in time, the finger worms just bend to the new positions. Careful, don't cross your fingers! You will get the worms all tangled up! Fun eh?

Alright... a final visualization for this post. If we wanted to, we could copy/slice our entire body and stack all billion worms up in a giant vat (again, see 1 and 2 below). Then, if we wanted to, we could grab all of the slices at one time-slice-level and stick them all back together to make a "me". If each time-slice-level was only self-aware when hooked together, and if we could grab/stack/attach them to make my "me" very quickly, that could actually be me!

Now, suppose they were not actually stacked separately, but rather all stacked together while also being sorted into worms... Huh? How could you do that??? Well, you can't without another dimension, but you can't grab/stack/attach them either, and we did not let that stop us! Lets just say that I am either the series of 3D "me"s that I see, or a billion worms depending on the perspective I want to use at the moment. Let that image soak for a bit. Happy stacking!
Nois.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visible_Human_Project
2. http://www.dhpc.adelaide.edu.au/projects/vishuman2/VisibleHuman.html