Everything is Physical
Everything is ultimately physical, and therefore ultimately having some kind of spatial aspect. Because of this, everything can be described in terms of dimensions. Everything, even God, Time, Hatred and Love, can be explained and manipulated in terms of space. In some respects, the only question that really matters is Where?
This is not to diminish how special these intangible concepts are. It is the case that the love your feel when you’re embracing your lover, or your desire to destroy that which you don’t understand, or even the ecstatic babble that comes out of your mouth when you speak in tongues is more than a chemical reaction, a jolt of electricity, or the mechanical pressure of lips on your cheeks. Yes, those things that motivate you, that keep you sane, that inhibit you are all experiences that occur in parts of reality that are not describable in the terms used to discuss those aspects of reality that are most readily perceived as common to all persons’ experiences.
All human beings experience reality differently. Yet, almost every human worldview has in common the experience of life in three dimensions, and knowledge of a ghostly fourth which is not really a dimension at all.
Dimensions are not alternate realities except in the sense that length and height are alternatives to one another. Unseen universes co-extant with our own are popularly known as dimensions, but are more properly referred to as “membranes.” Dimensions are fields of relation; they are the extent which events manifest in reality. Dimensions answer the question, Where? We have a box – or a ball, or a table, or a armadillo, or a posey, but to keep things easy, let’s just say we have a box – that everybody will agree has height, length, and width. We will have different ways of expressing the measurements, but experience teaches that most people experience these three dimensions the same.
Macrodimensions
d=0 dimensions is a point, a singularity. There is no possibility of relation, and thus description of a point is always metaphorical. It is non-dimensional. There is really only such thing as a point very, very rarely.
d=1, length, is a duality. There is one axis of relation, and therefore only one possible pure description. The range of description here is represented by a line or a curve.
d=2, height by length, represents the addition of a second axis of relation. There are two possible pure descriptions now, length and height. The range of description is now represented by a square or a circle.
d=3, depth by height by length, is three axes of relation, represented by a cube or a sphere. This many dimensions provides a suitable model for a description of reality as experienced by most people, sans Time. In such a model, there is depth, height, and length, and so now has the quality of substance. A concept of substance allows for what passes as descriptions of shape, place, and proximity.
Microdimensions
One popular notion among physicists is that this universe can be described in terms of d=11+1. The fourth through eleventh dimensions (d=n>3) are, however, too small to be experienced through the use of eyes, ears, fingers, noses, tongues, and so on. How small are these dimensions? They are not infinitesimally small, but they are close to it. To express it very crudely, d11 is approximately one trillionth of a millimeter “across” and as “long” as the entire universe. That’s right: if you could only sense the incredible smallness of the universe, you would see a universe in which all particles are only 1/1,000,000,000,000 of a millimeter apart. D=11+1 happens to be the number of different axes of relation that our universe has, but other universes may have others.
Each universe is a membrane. A membrane is a bulge in the substance of reality. The Big Bang was the rupture, ripple, or distortion in the cosmic substance that caused the bulge in reality where the laws of physics, as we think about them, were born. Each universe or bulge has its own set of physics – our universe is just one bubble pushing upwards out of a great, cosmic lava lamp. There could be any number of dimensions that work in universes outside ours, and there could be any number of different kinds of consciousness or life at work in other membranes. Regardless of how many dimensions there are – nova mathematician Hertzer Warrig has predicted the existence of more than seventeen thousand different ways to measure the different shapes that bulges may take - they originate from a single king of cosmix substance in which irregularity is not only the norm, but also the basis of our entire existence, and, furthermore, excruciatingly fleeting.
Most people do have an experience of our own universe’s microspatial dimensions. The awareness of these smaller dimensions is what we call time. Think about it. Length, height, and depth all seem to be stable axes. One inch is always one inch – nevermind that the original tool used to measure one inch has actually changed size since it was forged. However, those things that exist in those stable dimensions are themselves unstable. The difference between you now and you twenty minutes ago cannot be measured in terms of the three dimensions, but is equally real.
Nova poet Nelila “Anonymous” Hawta-Jones, known for her enhanced ability to describe intangibles, has suggested in her poem “Scales of the Bamboo: Three Years Before the Death of the Last Panda” that the emotions, pleasure, and revulsion – the attraction of kittens, the satisfaction you get from ordering your card collection, the fear you feel when the closet door is just a little too open or a little too closed, or just deep sorrow – are all expressible in terms of space.
Time, change, love, hate, sorrow, guilt, anxiety, depression, and wonder are all experiences composed of our blurry, secondhand knowledge of the dimensions beyond the three that all humans agree upon. Therefore, time and other dimly perceived relationships between entities are really just placeholders for the usually indescribable experience of existence in d=n. They make it possible for us to conceive of limits to the shared universe by imposing a limit on it and reducing the infinity of possible relations to an innocuous (+1).
No comments:
Post a Comment