When I was still quite young, before I learned of relativity or could tell time on a clock, I crumpled up a photograph because I was young and destructive, but I remember feeling bad for the person in the photograph and how rude of me to crumple them up. I then wondered what they were seeing now that the frame of image they were living in was all crumpled and bent out of shape. Were they also now all bent out of shape, or would they even be able to tell since the space they occupied was bent all at the same angles. I wondered if they would be able to tell even if time passed since even light beams would be bent at the same angles. It also didn’t seem to matter what the shape was because I could unfold the photo and return it to its original shape or put it in some new shape, never would the person inside the image be able to tell anything was occurring. Then I wondered what if I was currently inside a photograph would I be able to tell if was crumpled or not?

I was too young at that time, but the thought stuck with me and eventually I did come to understand Einstein and his thought experiments with light and the story of Flatland, and it has helped me understand the concepts of higher dimensional objects such as tesseracts and Klein bottles even though I’m obviously unable to fully grok the concepts. That crumpled photo also marked the beginning of thinking about parallel dimensions, the place all the people in the photographs and on TV lived oblivious to my existence and that I was seeing them, and a multiverse full of all the possibilities that can be possible if you can just change the channel or spin the dial and tune in to a new frequency. That crumpled photo was like a seed that grew into a tree full of many branches of questions and thoughts and wonders.