In defence of Wormholes, Rabbitholes and other Cavties and Appertures

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Wormholes are great things. These tunnels that connect two points that are either very far, or are in different universes - you get the picture. Not like anyone one of us has actually seen one, but I'm sure them physicists know what they're talking about. In any case I'm not planning to argue with them, I just think the concept is really cool - if you stumble down one, you could emerge in a completely new universe (or an old one). This has of course inspired a slew of science fiction and speculative fiction set in alternate universes. My favorite in this line of thought is of course Haruki Murakami's 1Q84. I've talked about the lyrical quality of the prose earlier. 

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Coming back from our little detour, Wormholes are great things. So are Rabbit holes, like the one Alice fell down. Because half a century before Einstein got around to writing about the General Theory of Relativity, which laid the conceptual foundation for wormholes, the nerdiest writer of all time, Lewis Carroll (or Charles Lutwidge Dodgso, if you will) needed something to escape the banality of human existence. And so we had a curious Alice tumble down a Rabbit hole and emerge in a Wonderland. We also have a beautiful, enigmatic song by Jefferson Airplane, White Rabbit, which poked holes in Censors' efforts to curtain freedom of expression. It is widely touted as one of the first songs to sneak drug references past censors on the radio. Here is a kickass cover by the absolutely badass Amanda Palmer. 

'Down the Rabbit hole' is now fairly common expression to describe what we do on the internet. You're reading something and you follow a link to something else and before you know it, you're reading about something completely different. Going down the Rabbit hole in Wikipedia is a genre in itself and gets it's own word - a wikihole. There are those who have explored the depths of these wikiholes and claim that if you keep going down one, you'll eventually end up on the page for philosophy.

I went down a Rabbit hole recently with some very curious results. I was reading one of my favorite bloggers, Jai Arjun Singh (whose blog is incidentally called Jabberwock - a Lewis Carroll character)

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interview author Jerry Pinto. I stumbled on this hilarious poem about an algebra text book written by Messrs Hall and Knight. It talks about how they conspire to torment little hapless little children.

'How hard it is', said Mr Knight, 'to hide the fact from youth

That x and y are equal: it is such an obvious truth!'

We'd put the problem well beyond our little victims' reach.

'It is', said Mr Hall, 'but if we gave a b to each,

- Dr E V. Rieu

I've been there and suffered through it, as have an entire generation of engineering aspirants (if not more). So I was pleasantly surprised to find a poet who shared my woes. I went on a trip of my own, down the memory lane (or hole, if you will). Speaking of memory, I'd like to sign off with a quote from someone who has mined the depths of memory like no other:

People claim that we recapture for a moment the self that we were long ago when we enter some house or garden in which we used to live in our youth. But these are most hazardous pilgrimages, which end as often in disappointment as in success. It is in ourselves that we should rather seek to find those fixed places, contemporaneous with different years.

- Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time