Thinness, especially the female variety, is held in high regard by society.
We grow tired of hearing how thin Lindsay and Nicole have become; tales peppered with rumours of anorexia. bulimia and news-making substance abuse. The tabloids splash photographs taken from peculiar angles across their pages desperately trying to communicate the true extent of their thinness.
Celluloid, with its two dimensional eye, could make a wraith look fat. A little distortion is bound to happen when the image of a real person is being transmitted through a wire. Are these starving starlets hellbent on turning themselves into two-dimensional Flat Stanleys able to slide easily between the layers of plastic and plasma through which we view them.
When our computer crashed this week, the skinny world it houses disappeared before our eyes. Our access to its dimensions was barred by a stubborn bit of software that signalled its flatlining status with a question mark that winked at us menacingly from the middle of our monitor.
In an attempt to rescue it, we fed as much of this waning planet as we could via firewire onto another computer that heaved uncomfortably under the weight of its collective memory – all 15 gigabytes. (FYI: The computer lived.)
What is this insubstantial universe that we navigate so studiously? Do we hope to discover some Nirvana in its virtual depths? We conjure up images, helped along by artists' renditions a la Matrix, of neon pipes lighted against a background of black nothingness, speeding us through tunnels, funnelling us in binary code of noughts and ones through a vortex of wormholes to our destination (usually, and disappointingly so, the logo of some IT company).
Einstein's chief obsession before he died was to draw together the two competing visions of the universe: on the one hand the logical, mechanical 'real' world of the space-time continuum, ruled by the planets and stars, and on the other, the submicroscopic world of quantum physics, dominated by jittery particles, whose movements can only be guessed at.
What scientists know today is that reality, on extremely fine scales, becomes pixellated, and the space-time continuum is distorted beyond recognition. The laws of cause and effect break down, allowing particles to jump from point A to B without traversing the space in between. At its heart, the universe is a cosmic roll of the dice.
The theory du jour, meant to draw us closer to a theory of everything, is called M-theory. The 'M' stands for whatever you like: matrix, mother, mystery, magic, or as its creator, Edward Witten admits, 'murky' or even 'missing'. M-theory requires the existence of up to seven dimensions in addition to the four to which we have become accustomed (height, width, length and time).
To complicate matters, scientists postulate that the particles that formed the basis of quantum theory, are actually tiny vibrating string-like loops, or one-dimensional branes (membranes are two-dimensional). No one knows which shapes (for these branes can conjure themselves into a multitude of bewildering shapes) represent the fundamental structures of our universe.
What is likely is that our real world is as unpredictable, infinite, and therefore as fragile, as the computer-generated one that we have created.
Perhaps, to become a truly immortal screen goddess, one has to exist in one dimension.
Poor Nicole and Lindsay will have to work even harder at transforming their physical bodies into lines (?) or even holograms, free forever from the confines of existence, able to squeeze easily through even the finest optical fibre, mirroring the success of the synthetic actress invented by Al Pacino in the movie S1MONE. You can be too thin! © Debbie smit – The Sunday Independent
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