First off, I'm utterly offended that there isn't an entry under the categories for "Science and Technology." I mean, what the hell? I find it insulting that Myspace assumes nobody here is going to talk about the universe around us. And before anyone says anything, this is most certainly NOT a web or HTML topic. What, am I supposed to classify this under...life? News and politics? (Are there interstellar wars out there? Stars lobbing flares and planets at each other?) Romance and relationships? (Shock! An illicit affair between a quasar and the Large Magellanic Cloud!) Lunacy, I say!
Anyway, I was thinking about the dimensionality of things on the Subway, trying to wrap my mind around the idea of dimensions above the fourth. Really, I was trying to decide whether the concept of a fourth spatial dimension as anything other than time is asinine. I think that it is, because space as a word is very specifically defined as three dimensional, with "physically measurable" components. Tack on a fourth, and you're automatically talking about time. Unless you talk about a fourth dimension that moves along WITH time, but I think that would just end up being a fifth dimension. Weirdness! Or maybe I'm playing with words instead of playing with concepts, which is just ridiculous. Anyway, everything that defines space seems to be derived from space. If an object is defined as three-dimensional, then it is said that it can be moved from one location to another, but the terms "location" and "moved" seem to me themselves entirely dependent upon a definition of space in the first place, thereby rendering the whole thing circular. It seems the mathematicians have it right after all - only math can really define this in a nice, clear-cut way.
What does this have to do with the fifth (and above ) dimension? Well, it's hard to imagine because we can't perceive it in the same way as the other three, but time is just another axis, perpendicular (orthogonal, as we engineers call it) to the other three. We just can't...measure the fourth axis the same way we do the first three. Now, we've established that two objects can't exist in the same place at the same time, which brings me to my first point of speculation. Why can't an object exist in two places at the same time? Of course, we would be completely unable to perceive such an event (I really ought to read up a little more about the discreteness of time, and the relevance of Planck's constant. Quantum mechanics has always been a difficult topic for me to wrap my mind around. I think it's because I'm a very visual person, and quanta are very difficult to properly visualize.) because the object is effectively changing its position in only three dimensions, and not moving along the fourth. Actually...oh, right - that would require said object to be moving at the speed of light. Well, that answers that question.
You know, the more I think about it, the more I want to just talk to a quantum physicist about all this. Reading a book is all well and good, but they can't always answer your questions in a meaningful way. What really brought this whole thing up was a speculation on my part that so-called "psychic" or "telekinetic" powers may actually just be a result of someone capable of picking up cues that exist along a different dimensional axis - one that we can't readily perceive. If we're heading into the realm of disembodiment, it's not necessarily unreasonable for something to exist solely along the axis of time, with no components along the first three. Throw a fifth and a sixth dimension in there, and it would have a fully realized three-dimensional "space" of its own without ever having to touch a "physical" space where we can readily perceive it. Hell, superstring theory (which I don't really understand at all) suggests at the existence of anywhere from 11-26 spatial dimensions, and if we're stuck looking at four, well...that's a lot out there that we just plain can't see. Why should humans necessarily exist in only four dimensions if there really are dozens more floating out there?
Perhaps there could be a nice, scientific explanation for ghosts, telepathy, and all the other pseudoscientific wonders of the world after all.
And maybe this has been much more of a philosophical speculation than a scientific one.
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