IN WHICH I GO ON ABOUT A SPHERICAL UNIVERSE

My old colleague Steve once said that if the Universe is truly infinite, it means that by definition, reality is repeated an infinite number of times, along with minor variations of reality, which are also repeated everywhere.

I told him that that meant the Universe had no centre, and in the absence of any better options, it might as well be my desk. 

Steve retorted that it actually meant we could hire a spaceship and travel in a straight line until we found the next version of us, having the same conversation in an identical office in a distant galaxy. The Other Me, would be equally as confident that his desk was the centre of the Universe.

I'll be honest, the Other Me can have it. Besides, the Other Steve would have persuaded him to fly back this way and there'd be nobody there anyway. 

I've been thinking about that conversation, looking out through the rain today. The sky is a dreary grey and the concrete is dark with the sploshing drops of cold, white rainwater.

I'm not sure I can believe there's another me out there, looking back through a wet afternoon in a distant solar system. I can't believe the Universe works like that.

But if that means that the Universe is not infinite, if I'm the only one of me, then the whole thing has an edge, a boundary beyond which physics, time and thermodynamics might not work anymore. I'm not sure which of the two possibilities is harder to imagine. Logic tells me that one of them must be the truth. The Universe has a surface, a border, an edge which is theoretically possible to reach, or it doesn't. There's not really an inbetween. 

Then (still staring at the rain) it occurred to me that it might be like imagining the difference between a flat Earth and a round one. Imagine if, hundreds of years ago, you set off on a journey to the edge of the world, believing wholeheartedly that you were travelling in a straight line away from where you started. It would be strange to see the Moon rising on its side and all the constellations tipped up, but not half as strange as eventually arriving exactly where you left! Maybe the Universe is like that, sort of multidimensionally spherical - if you go far enough away, you end up where you began.

I chuckled to myself as I realised that I would never have known the difference between discovering the empty desks that our doppelgangers had left behind, and actually arriving at the same place we'd left in the first place! It is after all, exactly the same thing.

I pulled up my chair and switched my laptop back on. I probably ought to get on with some work.