The Distance Between

Yessentuki The Simplest Math Problem in the Universe

Kurduvādi I have a confession to make. I don’t understand string theory.

Neither do most people who claim they do.

But every once in a while I stumble onto an idea so simple that it becomes a flashlight. It doesn’t solve the mystery. It simply lets me see a little farther into it.

Imagine the universe before there was a universe. No stars. No planets. No atoms. No space. No time. Just nothing.

Physicists will rightly object here. “Nothing” is a loaded word. Some definitions of nothing still contain quantum fields or physical laws. Fair enough. Let me use a different word instead.

Zero. Not the numeral on a calculator, but perfect balance. Perfect symmetry. A state with no distinction between left and right, before and after, something and nothing.

Now imagine that balance changes. Not by a thousand. Not by a million. By one. That is the entire thought experiment. One break in perfect symmetry.

Modern physics already tells us tiny imbalances can change everything. The universe holds matter instead of equal parts matter and antimatter because, for reasons we still don’t fully understand, roughly one extra matter particle survived for every billion matter-antimatter pairs in the earliest moments after the Big Bang. Had the two sides matched exactly, they would have annihilated each other. No galaxies. No Earth. No us.

Everything we know exists because reality favored one side of the equation by the smallest imaginable amount.

That fascinated me. It made me wonder whether complexity begins the way mathematics often does, with the smallest possible change.

String theory raises a related puzzle. It proposes our universe may hold more dimensions than the four we experience, curled into shapes too small to see. Here’s the catch. There isn’t one way to curl them. There are an almost unimaginable number of possibilities, and each shape produces a different universe with different particles, different forces, different physical laws.

Ask a string theorist why our universe has the constants it does and the answer may depend on how those hidden dimensions are folded. The obvious next question is the one every twelve-year-old asks. Which fold is ours? At the moment, physics doesn’t know.

I don’t bring this up to criticize string theory. I bring it up because it exposes something beautiful. Reality may run astonishingly complicated, but every attempt to explain it searches for something simpler underneath. Newton reduced falling apples and orbiting planets to one law. Maxwell united electricity and magnetism. Einstein connected space and time. Particle physics hunts for deeper symmetries still. Science has always moved toward simpler explanations, not more complicated ones.

Perhaps the deepest explanation is also the simplest. Not “God said so.” Not “it just happened.” Mathematics. Not mathematics as a language, but mathematics as reality itself.

That is the leap my own thinking has taken. I call it Evidentialism. Not because I think I’ve solved cosmology. I haven’t. But because evidence keeps pushing me toward the same conclusion.

Mathematics stands strangely independent of us. No one invented two plus two. No civilization voted for pi. The Pythagorean theorem stood true before Pythagoras and will remain true long after humanity disappears. Mathematical truth doesn’t care whether anyone discovers it. It simply is.

If that’s true, mathematics may not describe the universe. The universe may be one expression of mathematics, reality what mathematics looks like when it turns physical.

If that sounds like philosophy, it is. But philosophy has always lived just beyond the edge of science. Yesterday’s philosophy often becomes tomorrow’s experiment. Atoms were philosophy once. So were black holes. So were gravitational waves. Then someone found a way to test them.

I don’t know whether the universe began with a zero becoming a one. No one does. I simply know the image keeps returning to me. A perfect balance. One tiny asymmetry. Everything else unfolding from it: galaxies, chemistry, life, a species capable of asking how it all began.

Maybe that’s wrong. Maybe reality turns out stranger than anything I can imagine. History suggests it probably will.

But if the deepest truth of the universe is eventually written on a chalkboard, I suspect it won’t fill a paragraph. It will be an equation. And on that day, we may learn that the most complicated thing we’ve ever known began with the simplest math problem imaginable.

Zero. Then one.

Finding The Third Person

We have become a nation well trained in the first person.

We think about ourselves. We talk about ourselves. We talk to ourselves. Even when we listen, we often wait for our moment to speak rather than actually exchange an idea.

We have become a nation of first-person citizens, led by the ultimate first-person president in Donald Trump. The MAGA movement may be the first-person point of view made manifest: my country, my grievance, my truth, my loss, my victory.

Social media probably helped get us here. Then again, Trump may be a product of social media, which may be a product of us. The whole thing may be circular.

Regardless, we have gotten very good at the first person.

There is a rarer class of people who can find the second person. They can find you. They can stop long enough to consider the person across from them. What that person wants. What that person means. What that person may be trying to say while we are busy preparing our response. That is harder than it sounds.

But there is an even rarer breed: the third-person citizen.

I do not mean people who refer to themselves in the third person. That may be the most obnoxious mutation of the species.

I mean the ability to step outside yourself and see the person you are presenting to everyone else. To watch yourself from across the room. To hear what you just said as though somebody else said it. To see your behavior as though you were watching yourself in a movie.

This is particularly difficult for white men. I know because I am one.

I try not to mansplain. I try to listen. I try to understand what another person is telling me. And I still catch myself doing exactly what I think I am avoiding.

I explain what I want. Someone responds. Then instead of absorbing the response, I explain my reasoning again.

Maybe with different words. Maybe more slowly. Maybe with more detail.

As though the problem could not possibly be my argument. It must be their failure to understand it.

That is when I lose the third person.

Because if I could step outside the conversation for a moment and watch the scene, I might see something entirely different.

I might see a guy who thinks he is explaining himself clearly. Everyone else might see a guy who refuses to listen.

Third-person thinking is not empathy.

Empathy is valuable, but it is a double-edged sword with a razor-blade handle.

You do not always need to feel what another person is feeling. Sometimes you cannot. Sometimes you should not.

Third-person thinking comes before that. It lets you see the scene well enough to decide whether empathy is necessary.

Think of your life as a movie.

Everything you say is dialogue. Everything you do is action. Other people are watching the character you play, whether you realize it or not.

We have spent decades being told to speak our truth. Find our true selves. Be authentic. Tell the world who we are.

Maybe we have spent so much time looking inward that we have forgotten to look at the screen.

Because you are the star of exactly one movie. Yours.

There are eight billion other biopics playing simultaneously. In those movies, you are not the star.

You may be the spouse. The parent. The friend. The boss. The asshole at the grocery store.

You may walk through one scene and disappear forever. Most of the time, you are not in the movie at all.

Finding the third person means understanding which role you are actually playing.

It means occasionally leaving the star’s chair, walking into the audience and watching yourself perform.

You may discover that the character you thought you were playing is not the character everyone else sees.

That perspective may help save a country obsessed with the first person.

It may also save something larger.

Your place in eight billion other movies.