Recently I began thinking of things, using an arrowed cross measure. An arrowed cross is a cross having the vertical and horizontal lines (measures) having arrows at their extremities. (The arrows simply indicate directions. Nothing else.) The horizontal measure is marked with 1 on the left and 10 on the right. It is a measure of survival competition on the earth, or the measure of egos and imitations/competitions driven by the egos. It is the “tellurian” measure of realities, which are characterized by the collision and jostling of egos against egos.
   The vertical measure is marked with 0 (nothing) below and ∞ (infinity) above. It is in a manner of speaking a “cosmic” measure. The lower half of the measure (0 measure) is a sort of scientific scale by which our analysis of all the phenomena around us is gauged. The upper half of the measure (∞ measure) is a sort of artistic scale by which our creativity in search of our “self” and “style” (=values/visions) is gauged.
   With this cross measure applied, Qaddafi is an apt example of 10 tumbling down to 1 along the horizontal measure. He was a monumentally egocentric figure who had no heart to feel for the others. He, like so many despots in the past, tormented many people and at the end died a dog’s death hunted down by the tormented. There is little about him that can be measured with the 0 scale or the ∞ scale.
   The world today faces not a few knotty problems. The earthly pundits huff and puff on TV, applying the horizontal measure only. They don’t know we are cosmic beings also. (They better learn something from Miyazawa Kenji.) The ultimate solution, if any, for an individual or a country may never materialize until we begin seeking our “self” and “style” by applying the vertical measure also.

Brian Greene, professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University, is an outspoken proponent of the multiverse. According to him, the multiverse is “a grand cosmic bubble bath of universes,” our universe being a single expanding bubble inhabiting it. As I understand it, his multiverse proposition may be based on the following backgrounds:

1. Einstein’s equations break down at the initial moment of our universe. The big bang therefore provides no insight into what powered the bang itself.
2. In the 1990s, some astronomers measured the rate of cosmic deceleration, which they theorized to result from gravity, but they discovered instead that the expansion of space went into “overdrive about 7 billion years ago” and has been accelerating ever since. This signifies the discovery of “dark energy” which drives every galaxy apart from each other.
3. After that, scientists attempted to determine the amount of dark energy to explain the observed cosmic acceleration. But this attempt ended in a spectacular failure with a “greatest mismatch between observation and the theory in the history of science.”
4. String theory, which was originally hoped to provide a single set of definitive equations realizing Einstein’s dream of a unified theory, came up with numerous solutions, which may be as numerous as 10⁵⁰⁰ . The enormous diversity of possible universes thus implied proves vital to the advocates of the multiverse.
5. Potential collisions between our expanding universe and its neighbors may provide direct evidence for the multiverse.

The “multiverse” expands the circumference of our ignorance a billionfold. Questions arise. Like what about the beginning and the possible end of the multiverse? Or is the question of the beginning and the end (time scale) of the multiverse completely irrelevant? And, as I strongly suspect, there may be neither “physical” zero nor “physical” infinity, like there is no “physical” time. If there is some interaction between the bubble universes, isn’t the totality of the multiverse still a universe, so isn’t the multiverse a misnomer at best?

  “Mandela, Mandela, you’re the only one. There’s nobody like you,” sang many South African people in praise of what he’s done for them.
    Nelson Mandela died on December 5, 2013. Humanity has lost a brightest star sparkling with celestial grace like Venus in the predawn sky. But, of course, the star Mandela will keep on shining in our hearts even more beautifully.
    In the apartheid South Africa, he must have suffered hellish pains both physical and mental in the face of heartless prejudice and sheer cruelty. His soul must have been tormented by incessant onslaughts of bitter hate, anger, and grief. But he eventually turned his hate, anger, and grief into Love, Forgiveness, and Smile magnified a billionfold.
    The scarcity of Mandela wisdom in the human world is appalling. We definitely need Nelson Mandelas in Syria (where the DT-worshiping fanatics are butchering each other in a Dan-Brownesque Inferno), in Japan and China (where petty-minded, goody-two-shoes politicos are bickering over tiny islands in the East China Sea), and everywhere around the world.
    “Mandela, Mandela, you are the only one. There’s nobody like you,” we must keep singing.