An Excursus in Orthographic Cosmology and/or Cosmological Orthography of the Babelverse A Preliminary Report
Claudette von Helganschtein Searsplainpockets and Helgi von Helganschtein Searsplainpockets Principal Interns in Quantum Physicolinguistics The Institute for Bibliotecababelology
Ẍenoörthographic Quasȉcosmogȍnич Keplȯπτολεμαοhawkinġian Ṕortulaṕonticular Ǣdificōcōnstrūctiōnæ—known colloquially, though inexactly, as “omnidimensional alphabridges”—are long-theorized but little-evidenced hypothetical, potential, side-effectual artefacts of high-speed wh-movement at lexico-quantum scale in environments of extreme referential density. They are predicted in certain very theoretical loop quantum grammaticality frameworks, but until now there has been no direct evidence of their existence.
During our internships at the Min Plenken Institute for Physicolinguistics, under the supervisory mentorship of Frau Prof. Dr. Dr. Wurmlöcherin, we synthesized a novel material from lexico-quantum foam shaped by a 4.33 gigaHockett displacement field into interlocking chymʌovɯʎɥɔ loops, which we have since dubbed Borgestronium. By converting a custom-designed English sentence—with 75 clauses arranged in 39 nested levels, featuring seventeen semantic roles, and requiring more than 200 pronouns—into a question about an actor in the most deeply nested clause, we generated wh-movement at speeds of 413.2 x-bars per µ-α, more than 1200 times faster than previously recorded. This ultra-high-speed wh-movement in the deep referenticity well of the sentential matrix induced extreme fluctuations in the syntactosemantic field, exciting chymʌovɯʎɥɔ loop orthographic resonances within the Borgestronium.
To our astonishment, the self-reinforcing, coherent resonance of the Borgestronium rapidly increased and created a naked orthographic singularity, which immediately resolved itself into a concrete instance of a previously only theoretic omnidimensional alphabridge! To our further astonishment, the alphabridge remained stable on macroscopic scales of time and space—the aperture was approximately 3.142 microns wide and lasted for approximately 2.718 milliseconds—which gave us more than ample time to perform a preliminary scan of the environment. At this point our increasing astonishment could only be quantified with increasingly large cardinal infinities, but it did in fact seem that—within the scope of our brief scan—we had opened an alphabridge to the universe of the fabled (and previously fictional) Library of Babel.
The Library of Babel, as described by Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges, is an unfathomably large edifice, containing every possible 410-page book, written with 25 symbols—22 Latin letters, period, comma, and space. It contains every true history of every individual creature who ever lived in every conceivable universe, a vastly larger collection of boring, false, or even libelous histories of every such individual, a yet larger collection of every book previously mentioned but with one typographic error, a yet again larger collection of said books with two typos, etc., and—in the limit, and dwarfing the number of all coherent and semi-coherent works—untold amounts of gibberish. To say that the Library is unfathomably large does a grave disservice to the size of the Library. It would be quite a few orders of magnitude of orders of magnitude larger than our own observable universe.
Despite the odds against ever finding much of anything intelligible in the small fraction of the Library we were able to scan—a minuscule 13.9 quadrillion books—in the milliseconds we had available, three books actually seemed to have meaningful content.
The first book was a very brief historical overview of the Speculative Grammarian Editorial Board, from the journal’s “true founding” in 54,365 B.C.E. to its eventual final, irrevocable demise at 27:89:11 a.a.m., Raskuary 14⅜th, 6,283,185 C.E. at the hands of [REDACTED]. Despite the brief book devoting an entire chapter to the extreme measures taken by the SpecGram legal department to suppress details concerning [REDACTED] and deny the general truthfulness of the book—implying it to be of the untrue, libelous sort—the SpecGram legal department has taken extreme measures to surpress details concerning [REDACTED] and has denied the general truthfulness of the book. (According to the book, however, all will be revealed at 27:89:08 a.a.m., Raskuary 14⅜th, 6,283,185 C.E.)
The second book was a generally faithful Esperanto translation of Chomsky’s The Minimalist Program, and thus, we realized, not actually meaningful.
The third book contained concise but readily comprehensible plans for building “quantum drones”, able to traverse alphabridges by the billions, existing in a superposition of an unfathomable number of places at the same time—and thus able to map the otherwise unfathomable extent of the Library in a short time.
Our anticipation surpassing our previous astonishment, we wondered, would the Library of Babel repeat infinitely? Was it boundless but finite, or bounded with something resembling an “outer edge”? Was it static? Expanding, like our own universe? Contracting somehow?!
Our favorite hunch—for what more could it be?—was that the Library is actually boundless, but finite, as some suppose our universe may be: a three-dimensional skin on a four-dimensional sphere that wraps around on itself seamlessly, like a circle on a piece of paper in 2D or the surface of the earth in 3D—just with one more “D”.
With our excitement surpassing our previous anticipation, we synthesized the quantum drones, synched them to our monitoring and control systems, and opened another alphabridge to the Library of Babel. What happened next surprised us, but, in retrospect, should not have.
As one might have expected—though our surprise surpassed our previous excitement—the plans for the quantum drones are indeed “false”, in that the description of their behavior in the book is different from the behavior of the drones when built by actually following the plans in the book. Rather than necessarily being in a superposition of different places in the same universe, they can also be in a superposition of the same place in different universes, and as such we found an unfathomably large number of Library Universes.
Many are minor variations on the first we found. Books of 411 pages, 409 pages, 500 pages. Alphabets used include the 26 letters of English, the 18 letters of Hawai’ian (including okina and vowels with macrons), and variations on what punctuation or numbers are present.
Some Libraries are boundless but finite, as we hypothesized. Some repeat their unfathomable number of works many times, and may be infinite—the drones are marvels beyond comprehension, but they do have their limits. Another Library repeats, but each repetition we could detect was a transliteration of the previous one into another writing system—Cyrillic, Greek, Armenian, etc. And, of course, Libraries exist entirely in those and other well-known writing systems.
Some specific variants of note that we were able to identify (with help from M.A.Y.N.A.R.D. in sifting through all the data) include:
• A Library using the full International Phonetic Alphabet.
• A Library using the 26 letters of the English alphabet, plus the character Ћ, seemingly used to mean “the”, just like that Australian guy suggested.
• A Library using Galilahi’s script for the Fɛʀ↓ʁʘʊⓢ↑.
• A Library using an IPA encoding of the language of the Perry So-so“go-getters”.
The smallest Library we found was tiny and, as prophesied by Quine, contained only two books—one with a single dot, the other with a single dash.
Despite the unfathomable value of our findings, administrators at the Min Plenken Institute forced Frau Prof. Dr. Dr. Wurmlöcherin—and by extension, us—to halt our experiments. The quantum drones seemed to have other unanticipated and undocumented side effects—lexico-quantum disturbances in the neighborhood of the research site increased exponentially over the short time we were using the drones, and never really returned to previous background levels. (Residual effects are even sometimes seen in this report, and they can increase over time.)
Obviously, our disappointment surpassed our previous surprise, but we understand the need for caution. Our move from the Min Plenken Institute to Frau Prof. Dr. Dr. Wurmlöcherin’s newly founded Institute for Bibliotecababelology, and our current search for a “maximally lenient” host country for the Institute, in no way undercuts our respect for and commitment to safety and caution.
While we await the construction of the Institute for Bibliotecababelology’s new quantum drone factory, we can take a moment to reflect on what we have so far... discovered? learned? encountered?
What to make of the unexpected comprehensibility of the books in the Library Universes? The only logical position to hold pre-Library of Babel would be that orthographies are created by humans—sometimes deliberately, often unconsciously, and never too permanently. But now, we must take a page from the mathematicians’ book—found, no doubt, in the Library that uses 26 Latin letters, 10 Arabic digits, and almost a hundred common mathematical symbols—and ask whether writing systems, like mathematical systems and related proofs, are created or discovered.
We previously had considered Penrose’s notions of Quantum Consciousness to be so much intellectual swill laced with equal parts self-aggrandizement and self-delusion, on par with Chomsky’s Universal Grammar. But our immediate response to our own findings is to ponder whether some comprehensive theory of Quantum Consciousness and Universal Grammar could explain the creation of writing as the instantiation of an alphabridge to a particular Library.
Or, even more speculatively, could the creation and widespread use of a particular orthography by alphabridge-enabled human minds led to the creation of one or more Library Universes? Relatedly but more limited in scope and scale, did we defy unfathomable odds in finding the plans for the quantum drones, or did our unfathomable desire to map the Library somehow create the plans?
Perhaps we’ll never truly understand the origin or meaning of the Library Universes, but we will try, and we expect to generate unfathomable quantities of data, citations, and tenure in the process.
