| A Quick Tour of Ten Dimensions | 2006-07-04 12:00 7 comments |
 by Flemming FunchAt Tenth Dimension, you find a quick tour of the possible 10 dimensions of a universe based on string theory. Well, I don't know how scientific it is. Scientists who talk about 10 dimensions tend to bend over backwards to point out that they're not really the kind of dimensions that are useful for us to move in, but they're just sort of curled up in a very small place, of no practical significance to us, and only needed to make the equations add up. Which I tend to not believe, so I like it better this way. Rob Bryanton has a fun Flash animation that helps to visualize 10 dimensions. Essentially it is like the difference between 2-dimensional flatlanders, and our well-known 3 dimensions, which is something we fairly easily can visualize. So, we can imagine the same magic continuing in more dimensions. Seen from a lower dimension, somebody who moves in a higher dimension can do impossible things, like appear out of nowhere, or travel huge distances in an instant. Because higher dimensions fold lower dimensions. Just like you might find certain distances on a piece of paper (a 2D plane), but you can fold it in 3 dimensions, and bring any two of its points together, so you can get from one to the other, without traveling any 2D distance. It would be equally logical that you can do the same with time and 3D space, or with whole timelines, or universes of possibilities, once you use more dimensions. And if we assumed that the real reality is the 10 dimensions, rather than the 3, 3 1/2 we're used to, it potentially can change our perspective greatly. And, indeed, it might be an important element in our growth process that we're able to visualize these dimension, so that we maybe can start living more in the real reality, rather than insisting we're just flatlanders forever. The website there seems to be an intro to a book by Rob Bryanton, called "Imagining the Tenth Dimension". |