Hitchhiker's Guide to the Omniverse

"There are truths and there are non-truths. There are things that can be accepted with complete accuracy, and others that defy logic from any angle you look at them."

The words were the first of a handful I had heard this morning, and my sleep had been constantly interrupted the previous night with bizarre dreams. I leaned forward and furrowed my brow to give the impression that I had not only fully received the message, but that I was now deeply thinking it through. Sometimes the best class to go to on a Thursday is one you not only didn't pay for, and aren't getting credit in, but one taking place in a college you don't really even attend. For this reason I won't say anything more about the nature of the class itself, except that it involved deep thinking and was somewhere in the American Midwest. The pursuit of education is most fruitful, it seems, when the benefit of attending is nothing more than the knowledge gleaned itself.

With the grit of day old coffee grinding between my teeth I inhaled, ready to respond, then remembered where I was. The class moved on unhindered by my lack of input. Such is the way of the world. I could have thought of the most earth-shattering flaw in the philosophy of Descartes, and having not spoken, the earth would have continued spinning and dancing through the stars. Such is the grim virtue of inaction.

The thought I failed to expound was in response to the Aristotelian concept of non-contradiction, and the theory that in an alternate universe where the laws of physics and reality were completely different from our own, something as simple as 1 = 1 could be false. So in keeping with my current school of thought on trans-dimensional possibilities, I imagined a universe somewhere on a different frequency of possibility containing one being I named Bright Eyes, who helped me discover what I now call "The Bright Eyes Paradox."

Bright Eyes is an entity with not only complete control of his own dimensional frequency, but with the immutable propensity to consume all light on the dimension he is on forever. Seeing how an infinite number of variations of Bright Eyes would have to exist in his universe of origin and throughout all the others in his adjacent dimensional points of origin, I accepted the notion of his existence as a possibility (therefore, in keeping with the current theory of limitless possibility, his existence is in every way inevitable as each choice taken from the time when the laws of physics any universe was drafted manifests in both forms until the ends of time and space).

To put it simply, Bright Eyes consumes all light in the universe he lives in. When he has consumed all light, he splits and travels to his next destination, consuming all light there, and so on and so forth until every single possibility in the universe is completely consumed by his lust for photons. This army of infinite Bright Eyes' would eventually reach what is generally referred to as Earth Prime (the here and now semi-static universe we fool ourselves into believing we constantly live in) and would therefore consume all light.

If this is true, then why does light exist at all? Why wouldn't Bright Eyes have brothers and sisters that consumed everything from oxygen and heat to that annoying sound bank-tellers make when they chew penny-candy and meander with beaded spectacles pretending not to see you in line?

There are three possible conclusions to why this sound continues to exist along with light, heat, matter, and everything else in our universe. The first is the idea that this is the only universe in existence, and that the theory of infinite universes is completely void. The second explanation is that while these alternate realities may exist, complete with alternative laws of physics, travel between them is inhibited without exception by some multi-universal law. The third possibility, the one I think is most in keeping with the initial theory of infinite universes is that there's a mathematical balance. For every universe Bright Eyes (or any of his brothers and sisters) consumes or effects in any way, there are other split universes that are always unaffected. It is the reason infinity is such an important concept to understand, even if it is beyond us forever, because it solves this and many other paradoxes.