Scene: city street with high traffic flow, a person close to the walkway and press the button on the traffic light pole that used to come to the green for the pedestrian crossing. Skip a few seconds, the cars begin to stop, it is green for pedestrians. The person through the eyes of impatient motorists and continues its path on the opposite side of the road, and hear the noise of cars on the restart.
Who knows how many times have we had this small and seemingly insignificant experience. Everything is normal? Nothing has happened?
But everything has changed. The whole history of the world has changed.
think about it. All those people, aboard their car, they stopped for a minute. All of their events, from that moment onwards, were determined from that minute spent waiting. Most likely effects on the rest of their lives will be negligible, but it is not. That small event of waiting at the traffic lights may have unimaginable consequences.
Since I lack the imagination, here are a number of possible consequences:
- that minute of waiting did miss the train to one of the people who then was forced to wait for the next train. One of the two trains could be derailed: the person is alive or dead depending on which train took. Or (less tragic event) while waiting for the next train, he knows the person of his life, who then marry and have children with whom. That's sparked a pedestrian those percolations progeny
- that minute of waiting to get served a minute later, at home and not find a betrayal;
- that minute of waiting is better served to think about one thing and allowed to solve a problem that was likely to have serious consequences;
But I will not take away the taste to imagine many other consequences of that minute of waiting at traffic lights.
What happened I would call an "interference" in the "normal" sequence of events. Each event interferes with others, but this dell'attraversamento pedestrian has a particular charm that comes from the fact that depends on a voluntary act (that of the pedestrian who decided to press the button) and that this gesture has influence on many people (all those that stay with the car at the traffic light and then , followed by all those that have to do with them, and so on ad infinitum).
must be why, when I have to press that button, and then through, I am assailed by a subtle sense of guilt ... Theoretically
interference can add up with each other (I lose my train for a minute and soon after the strike began ferrotranvieri ...) or cancel each other out (lose a minute to light but I avoid it to be involved in a crash that happens with 100 yards). On second thought, however, that the events are administered seems obvious, but I understand that vanish completely unlikely: two events should occur, related to each other and with totally opposite effects ... yes, really unlikely.
From this little reflection shows how deeply intertwined the events and how to continually interfere with each other. It follows that nothing is really negligible: each event occurs at a given instant, taking with him the story of a variety of other events that occurred previously, and his DNA will propagate forever in the events to come.
The next time you press a button to bring up the green of a pedestrian crossing, a moment to think about everything you've just unleashed and while you hear the noise of those engines that share, maybe you too will feel the subtle sense of guilt ... but now you know what it depends.
