On Everything That Was, Is, and Will Be

“There is nothing new in the world except the history you do not know.” — A.D. Davies

What if every story has already been written? All our thoughts, life scripts, the situations we find ourselves in? Every book — from the first ever penned to the ones that don’t exist yet? Every scientific discovery, every drug formula, every lost manuscript, even a detailed account of each person’s future?

In 1941, Jorge Luis Borges wrote the story «The Library of Babel» — about an imaginary city-library where a countless multitude of books encodes every possible combination of letters and symbols. No two books are identical, and so their number is finite. Most of the pages are meaningless chaos, but among them are texts that contain absolutely everything: from the translation of every book into every language to a precise description of your life, or the letter you never sent your parents as a child.

The only catch is that the Library of Babel is vastly larger than the universe we can observe.

And yet, in 2015 Jonathan Basile built a website, Library of Babel, that recreates such a library virtually. It doesn’t store the books physically — that’s impossible — it uses a deterministic algorithm instead: any text you type is “anchored” to a set of coordinates (room, shelf, book, page) and always turns up in the same place. Nothing is saved — there is only a rule for turning coordinates into text. The algorithm can generate any page of any book knowing only its address, and that page will always be identical.

Open a random page, though, and you can find anything at all — a message from your future self, say — but the odds of such luck are vanishingly small.

It reminds me of certain theories about how our reality is built. Compact equations give rise to a boundless variety of phenomena, with no need to store every result in advance.

In four-dimensional spacetime, by one account, all events already exist — like the whole library with its pages ready and waiting. Our path is the choice of our own “volume” along a world line (a particular kind of curve in spacetime).

In quantum mechanics, any measurement is like turning a page: the wave function “branches” into every possible outcome, but we land on only one specific page. That “address” gets fixed in our memory and becomes part of our subjective reality, our recollection, our lived experience.

Realizing this helps us hold events — and our own importance — more calmly. Any situation is just one of the stories already modeled. We are not unique in what we feel, but we are unique in the decisions we make.

Here’s to us all choosing which page we’ll turn to next in our lives — assuming every option is on the shelf! 😎

P.S. And here’s a link to the page in the library that holds this very post.