The Breathing Of Atman

Being A Brief History Of Jeremy Morgan

Dimension 0 – The Big Bang

No time passes, for there is no time there. The seething elements of the Infrastructure – the unknown and unknowable membranes that support the eleven dimensions of our bubble universe – swirl on in their own mysterious shifting of potentials until at last, and immediately, separating membranes spin yet another bubble universe into being.

Dimension 1 – The Cosmic Background

The cosmic ray, discharged from the heart of a quasar ten billion years ago, strikes the atmosphere high above Shrewsbury, unleashing a shower of neutrinos which take no more notice of the thick air than if they were coasting in the hard vacuum, all that is save one – which passes first through the fuselage of a B17 bomber on a training mission over Wales in this, the month before D-Day – and then through the slate roof of the little house where Mr Rhodri Morgan and his wife Angharad have just conceived their first child – Jeremy. The neutrino strikes the nuclear heart of a hydrogen atom inside the yet-to-be-implanted zygote – spawning an electron and interfering with the transcription of a single codon during Jeremy’s first cellular fission.

This event – the single most improbable physical interaction that has ever taken place on the face of the earth – goes unnoticed.

Dimension 2 – Inflation

In the days before ultrasound screening, Angharad’s doctor is concerned by the unusual size of the head of the unborn child, which he can feel through the pale skin of her belly. He confides in Mr Rhodri Morgan that he fears the baby will be hydrocephalic. Mr Rhodri Morgan spends the remaining three months of his wife’s pregnancy preparing for the worst.

In the event Mrs Morgan has a successful four-hour labour. Mr Morgan is relieved to discover that Jeremy is not hydrocephalic – he simply has a large head.

Dimension 3 – The Standard Model

‘On my first day at grammar school, I was taken ill on the bus. Too well brought up to make a mess, I was sick into my new school cap.’

Dimension 4 – Event Horizon

He walks through the courtyard in the cool October air and tosses the college scarf over his shoulder again. He still finds it hard to believe that he is really here. He has worked so hard in the last few months, finally achieving the required exam grades but only just, he fails to get in to his first and second choice colleges but is cleared at last by the pool system and comes up to Cambridge in the second week of October.

His first tutorial is terrifying. Until this time he has always found himself to be the brightest person in the room. Now he is eclipsed by not one, but half a dozen others. The tutorial has barely begun before he is certain that he can see the spectrum of colours in the room change as the conversation moves away from him so quickly that it red shifts like a receding galaxy. His tutor and two of the brighter students finish by discussing something called a muon that he has never even heard of. But the new challenge excites him. He practically runs from that first tutorial to the library, determined to be better prepared the next time.

Dimension 5 – Singularity

Her name is Sarah. It is February and the wind from the fens is cold. He has been running to stand still, spends most of his waking hours in the library but now at last he feels he is making progress. She is studying Oriental languages. Her textbooks fascinate him. They have page after page of Mandarin characters. It reminds him of opening his first mathematics books; there is so much impenetrable information and no obvious place to begin trying to understand it all.

They spend a lot of time together in the library, and then a little more outside it. One night he drinks five pints of Greene King and when he walks her back to her college he summons up enough courage to kiss her. She kisses him back. He feels like a Spectral Type K2 red hyper giant sun heading for supernova.

Later that night he carves their initials into the bark of an oak tree. As he stumbles homewards along the college backs his thoughts begin to spin inwards, drawn by an idea that attracts them like a grand singularity; like rogue planets trapped within the Schwarzchild radius of a black hole. There is an alignment. Something in the frozen air from the fens, the balance of alcohol and oxytocin in his blood stream and the physical structure of his brain – minutely altered by the long ago collision with a neutrino – locks together and all at once he sees it – the single grand truth uniting relativity and the standard model, cosmology and religion. The mathematics that describes it comes flashing into his brain in all its staggering beauty.

He sees. For the first time he truly sees how it all works, each exchange particle and decay product slotting into place in the vast fabric of reality. He spreads out his arms and looks upwards into the blazing stars whooping for the joy of it all, again and again. It is all so clear to him now. He spins around; dizzying himself, falls to the neatly mowed grassy slope beside the Cam, panting with exhilaration and promptly passes out.

In the morning he can remember nothing of his revelation.

Dimension 6 – Twistor

‘I just don’t think we should see each other any more Jeremy.’

Dimension 7 – Dark Matter

‘And what about Morgan?’

‘Yes. I think we can put him down as a star that failed to reach critical mass. He works hard enough, but never really seems to shine.’

‘Not suitable for post-graduate work then?’

‘No. Not at all.’

Dimension 8 – The Many Worlds Interpretation

LONDON (AP) – Jeremy Morgan, Nobel laureate and author, died on Tuesday 33 Octember at his home in Cambridge. Morgan won a Nobel Prize for his cosmological theory uniting General Relativity and the quantum Standard Model. He popularised his work in the best-selling ‘A Short History Of Space and Time’.

LONDON (Reuters) – One man was killed and two others badly injured in a car crash in Cambridge on Tuesday. The dead man was named as Mr Jeremy Morgan, 63, an accountant from Reading.

LONDON (AP) – Traffic in the centre of London was held up for several hours on Tuesday afternoon when a cameleopard escaped from the vehicle that was transporting it to the Regent’s Park zoo.

Dimension 9 – Entropy

Long, long, afterwards the peaceful and continuously expanding universe is torn asunder by the unstoppable extra-dimensional march of the membranes.

In the collapse, energy spills from the rendered universe, reenergizing and redirecting the ineffable membranes. The spread of energy from the bursting bubble is almost perfectly uniform and comes close to self-annihilation but is saved from that fate by the infinitesimal imbalance that has been caused by a tiny mass defect at the heart of a long dead star, where several billion atoms of carbon are missing that once were part of the bark of an oak tree.

Dimension 10 – Omega