You’d say this is too philosophical for this blog. It’s a physics blog. A blog of pure mathematical thinking. You’d be wrong. The Ship of Theseus. I have been wanting to cover this topic for a while, but it was only recently I found a rather interesting application of it in the world of science. But I’ll start you off with a quote from Anand Gandhi’s critically acclaimed art-house film ‘Ship Of Theseus’.

| “Or else, replacing the parts would change the person”

If you don’t know what the Ship of Theseus is, I’ll try to explain it briefly. A ship called say, ‘The Mariner’ was sailing across a vast sea, and on the way whenever a part got worn out it was replaced. By the end of the journey, no original parts of the ship remained, leaving the question, is the ship that arrived at the harbour still ‘The Mariner’?

Think about that for a second, and you’ll eventually come to the question, what is something anyway? What makes something itself? What is a thing's identity? No parts from the original Mariner are left, the ship is entirely comprised of a different atoms, only placed in a similar way as the original. But, is this a new ship? Or the same ship, because that is what it is identified as.

We as a species refresh all of our cells every 10 years, with new ones. I’m fourteen years old. I was Daksh when I was 4 and I am Daksh now. But no part of that existed in 2005, exists now.

Here’s what I define something as. An identity that uniquely distinguishes something from all other entities. Think about this for a second. Anything which is not anything but itself is something. This implies that if I was scanned, and my body was disintegrated and the same patterns of atoms were replicated, with my memories, my body and my thoughts, that new being would still be me. But where does this whack scenario occur?

Teleportation. Quantum teleportation reads you’re quantum state, disintegrates you, and sends this data to another end where it is used to create a replica of me with all my memories until my disintegration occurs. Surreal.

The question of what something is, is infinitely deep. I am Daksh. When I refer to myself as ‘I’, what am I referring to? The quantum state I bear? The arrangement of atoms? Or something tht isn’t physical? Something entirely different.

When I was 7 years old, I lived in a different city. I had a friend I used to sit with on my way to school, in the bus, and one day, I told him to imagine something. What if our entire city did not exist? This entire area was just never there? What if the earth didn’t exist? It is hard to imagine, everything you have known doesn’t exist anymore. What if the universe didn’t exist? A scenario like this is so vastly inexplicable, indescribable because it is true nothingness. Not lack of matter, but the lack of things that hold matter. Lack of everything. I could imagine it so vividly then. But I can’t now. Even with my hundreds of frustrating attempts to imagine true nothingness, I’m not able to. And that’s what I want to achieve. Welcome to the second phase of Philosophysics. The uncharted depths of philosophy, the backbone of modern physics.

Welcome, to the universe and nothing.