Another week past

I spent yesterday walking around the city again, which is my favourite way of getting things moving upstairs, when I need to think. Keeping the old engine oiled, so to speak.

We headed out after a brunch into the freezing cold air of Montreal, to climb Mont Royal and take some great pictures (I'm hoping Jo will contribute a few to this blog), but also to do some English conversation. Jo is an interior designer who's created a life for himself here for over a year, and has just started in a new job as a technician for a fairly prominent design office. His English is far better than most French people who learned through school, but a healthy dose of conversation will be a bit help for his job.

We ended up walking to the Oratoire St Joseph, which recently hit the Montreal headlines, when a guy entered with a gun and threatened to kill himself, in the middle of a mass (this place is a church). The enormous, cathedral-like building looks like a postmodern blend of a Soviet gulag and a giant temple for a religious sect. The organ is straight out of a Star Trek episode, and the 20 foot high wooden statues of the apostles who glare down at unsuspecting churchgoers, were the object of our fascination and mirth (sorry God, but what with being the creator, we thought you'd empathise with our need to laugh at this morose sight). Still, from the outside, this massive place of worship is an impressive promontory over the city, and certainly makes an interesting walk.

The walk across the cemetary, up to this church, and back round the glitzy Outremont neighbourhood with the floor heating under its driveways (I sh+t you not), led to the inevitable conversation about parallel universes, time travel, and how human decisions influence endless splits in the course of the universe, creating the past as well as the future (retroactive causality...). Then we walked home down the Lachine canal, tried some guitars in a guitar shop, and had a slap-up meal while watching a few episodes of Lost.

The episode happened to be about a character who has flash visions of the future and tries to influence the course of the planet through his actions. The acting is about as believable as a South American jungle island having polar bears, and the plot seems about as likely as Hollywood funding a decent director through a well-written movie this century. But of course, it echoed our conversation pretty nicely.

Any of your feedback on these questions would be useful to me.

- If physical energy is never lost but transformed, what happens to mental energy when we die? (for instance, the fact that we dream, and our dreams influence our mythology and narratives... surely that doesn't just disappear when after death)

- If particles from parallel universes manifest themselves in our universe (and I think this is the dominant school of thought in astrophysics at the moment), then is it possible for us to inhabit several universes at once, provided we can invent a tool which allows us to observe these shadow particles?

and most importantly:

- When I flew to Canada, I travelled a few microseconds in time, since I was further away from the earth while on the plane, and therefore time passed differently for me than it did for most of you. Does that mean I'm in a different dimension to you?

Just a few thoughts for Sunday morning, to get your brains going, or to get your blood boiling, if you have any real scientific understanding of these issues and can correct my misapprehensions. Please write comments, however abusive, to help me out!