The first thing to note is that together they comprise a very large set. The universal set, in fact. The largest set possible.
Each element (I refer here to elements of a set, not physical elements composed of identical atoms) is not 3 by 3 (noughts and crosses), not 8 by 8 (chess), not a 50 by 70 stitch people-pattern, not even a million pixel digital photo, but a three-dimensional matrix the size of the entire universe. They're chronological atoms, if you like, the result of dicing up the universe with a scalpel that cuts time.
Each cut of sliver has practically no duration. Its 'thickness' is that of one point's worth of time, just as in Euclidian geometry a line is one point across, and a plane is one point thick .
Try a thought experiment. It'll take only one <ahem> moment.
Shut your eyes and take a breath. Breathe slowly in and breathe out. At that point where the air ceased to move, imagine a camera shutter somewhere going "click". Visualize that moment - your universe digitized into a 3-D array of numbers.
Shut your eyes and take a breath. Breathe slowly in and breathe out. At that point where the air ceased to move, imagine a camera shutter somewhere going "click". Visualize that moment - your universe digitized into a 3-D array of numbers.
At a quick enough shutter speed - the crest of the shortest wave possible - you’d capture every atom, electron, particle right where it was (ignore any protest from the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle camp). Every position of the universe would be filled in—or left empty—with the RGB equivalent of exactly what existed there then.
Okay, lets catalogue every possible sliver, every possible arrangement of bits and pieces within that matrix.
These slivers, or the encoded information thereof, are the items contained in the Douglas Adams Gallery. Its inventory cannot but contain every possible (and impossible) status points of this or any other universe, in the past, in the future, both dreamt and imagined.
Now, storing all that information away unsystematically would not be useful. To make it systematic, we should explore the relationship between those slivers. What filing system would maximize the gallery's utility? To answer that, we need to look into the nature of the relationshis that may exist between them. That will help us classify and arrange them in some sort of Periodic Table.
Now, storing all that information away unsystematically would not be useful. To make it systematic, we should explore the relationship between those slivers. What filing system would maximize the gallery's utility? To answer that, we need to look into the nature of the relationshis that may exist between them. That will help us classify and arrange them in some sort of Periodic Table.
