How many dimensions are there?
21:00
Three, is what most people would tell you. They would be half correct.
The current physical theories work well in 4 dimensions. They are length, breadth, width, and time. Time? Well yes. The best way I have found the concept of time as a dimension to be explained is this. I need to provide my co-ordinates to a fellow human, to meet for coffee. I say the length, 7th street. I say the breadth, 11th avenue. I say the height, second floor. But I am still missing one coordinate. 5:30 pm, because without that information, fellow human would not be fully aware of the meeting point.
Therefore, time too, is a dimension.
Four dimensions. Settled.
Or is it?
Einstein is known to have compared what he calls god’s grand design to a lion, and modern scientific pursuit, an attempt to study the tail. Perhaps he was saying that the rest of this lion, is not in a world we can see. A world, beyond our perception. How do we see this world? We don’t have to, a pre-Einstein physicist already did.
In his eerie and haunting science work, ‘Flatland’ Edwin A. Abbott describes a world that he never saw. The fifth dimension.
Imagine a two-dimensional world, he said. Common intuition suggests that 2 dimensions are an inferior reality we see every day. Well, no. Can you imagine anything with no up or down? Probably not. But try. A purely two-dimensional world where there is no up or down. A line drawn around a man is a prison. The only way to across something, is to literally work around it.
What would a sphere look like to a world like that? Let’s imagine a sphere moving through this ‘flat land’ The sphere would appear to a point. As the sphere moved further, the point would become a growing circle. The circle would suddenly stop growing. The circumference. Classic sphere. It moves further, the circle shrinks to the point that it was born out of. Null. Void. Devoid, rather, of dimensions.
Dimensions.
Dimensions?
Dimensions.
Laughter.
Abbott has done the impossible. Abbott is a genius. Abbott, has seen worlds that man cannot even imagine. He subtracted one.
Don’t you see it?
The beauty of it?
In our pathetic 3-dimensional world, a four dimensional objects moving through would be three dimensional objects appearing, shifting shape, and disappearing.
Welcome.
I haven’t answered the question.
Answers. Boring. One dimensional.
Questions. That’s more like it. Uncertain. Unpredictable. Provocative.
What will I find at the other end? The higher dimension. Answers, and questions.
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