The Aleph

Another World - 1947 M.C. Escher

Just finished The Aleph by Jorge Luis Borges.

Jorge Luis Borges

Upon reading Borges' The Aleph, Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker comes to mind as
both connect to the vagaries of quantum without question. 

First Edition

How, then, can I translate into words the limitless Aleph, which my floundering mind can scarcely encompass? Mystics, faced with the same. problem, fall back on symbols: to signify the godhead, one Persian speaks of a bird that somehow is all birds; Alanus de Insulis, of a sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere; Ezekiel, of a four-faced angel who at one and the same time moves east and west, north and south. (Not in vain do I recall these inconceivable analogies; they bear some relation to the Aleph.)

Hand with Reflecting Sphere 

 

I want to add two final observations: one, on the nature of the Aleph; the other, on its name. As is well known, the Aleph is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Its use for the strange sphere in my story may not be accidental. For the Kabbala, the letter stands for the En Soph, the pure and boundless godhead; it is also said that it takes the shape of a man pointing to both heaven and earth, in order to show that the lower world is the map and mirror of the higher; for Cantor’s Mengenlehre, it is the symbol of transfinite numbers, of which any part is as great as the whole.

It seems, to Borges, the connect to reality involves brownian motion, the meander and the random walk as all three provide viable avenues enabling one to explore an existence we will never fully understand. 

Simulation of the Brownian motion of a large particle, analogous to a dust particle,
that collides with a large set of smaller particles, analogous to molecules of a gas,
which move with different velocities in different random directions.

Glen Canyon, US - Christian Mehlführer

Five eight-step random walks from a central point.
Some paths appear shorter than eight steps where
the route has doubled back on itself.