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| Spacetime (Image via Wikipedia) |
In the beginning …
In the beginning, the Big Bang sparked the emergence of: time, space, energy, matter, mathematics, symmetry, entropy, self-organization, and the classification of everything. And it seemed good for about 14 giga-years.
In the twentieth century, BigAl Einstein unified: energy and matter within the Special Theory of Relativity; space and time into spacetime; spacetime and geometry within the General Theory of Relativity. Other greats, including Planck, Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Pauli, Dirac, et (Big)al., ushered in Quantum Mechanics. It was great physics, but physics seemed incomplete without a unified theory, comprising General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, and everything else; a so-called Theory of Everything.
Then along came String Theory, and the promise of a Theory of Everything. It has made great strides in the last few decades, but it continues to be a work in progress.
Super-Spacetime Reality
Perhaps the most "inconvenient" truth about string theory is its insistence on at least six additional spatial dimensions, besides the three that are near and dear to us all. If you have difficulty visualizing time as the fourth dimension of spacetime, try to visualize reality described by ten dimensions! I'll wait …
It's not possible to visualize a 10-dimensional reality, because visualization is, by nature, conceptual sensing in three dimensions. There’s the rub. You can no more fit a 10-dimensional square peg into a 3-dimensional round hole than you can square the circle.
And yet it is relatively straightforward to mathematically conceptualize systems of arbitrary dimensionality, because mathematics is not constrained by visualization. Mathematical dimensionality is a generalization of the 3-dimensional visualization concept. This generalization is analogous, albeit in the opposite direction, to the simplification of 2-dimensional rendering for 3-dimensional objects, as is routinely accomplished in graphic imaging (e.g., above image).
What if we generalize not only the traditional 3-dimensional concept of visualization to its associated multi-dimensional mathematical concept, but also generalize the corresponding terminology, namely: generalize 3-dimensional visualization to multi-attribute mathematical analysis. This seems to me an enabling of interesting speculations.
If I may be so bold, I wish to consider the potential clarification enabled by thinking of 4-dimensional spacetime as "4-attribute" spacetime, instead. In so doing, I merely associate three of those attributes with the three dimensions of space, and the forth attribute with what BigAl called the "fourth dimension" of time. Seems less confusing, n'est-ce pas?
Here is my really bold speculation: Suppose that the 10-dimensional spacetime of string theory is conceptualized as our 10-attribute reality itself! I have coined such a description of reality "Super-Spacetime Reality".
Now for some fun speculations. What specifically would I attribute to those impossible-to-visualize additional six dimensions of string theory? Well, instead of how they are usually conceptualized (point-like "curled-up" dimensions), suppose we imagine they are those attributes of reality for whose existence we currently have no explanations.
For instance, what if symmetry, a very commonplace attribute of reality for whose existence we have no explanation, is in fact one of those six exotic dimensions that string theory postulates? Another intrinsic attribute of our reality is entropy, a fundamental concept of thermodynamics and information theory, but whose raison d'etre is unknown.
Yet another very interesting property of both animate and inanimate objects is the propensity for synchronization. That propensity is a form of the propensity for self-organization, namely the spontaneous emergence of order out of chaos. It is possibly the essence of negative entropy. And like entropy, negative entropy or "negentropy" (as Schrödinger termed it) may also be an attribute that can be linked with one of the six additional dimensions of string theory.
What fun it is to speculate reality's in sight. Oh, such jingling of bells and whistles …
Perhaps the most "inconvenient" truth about string theory is its insistence on at least six additional spatial dimensions, besides the three that are near and dear to us all. If you have difficulty visualizing time as the fourth dimension of spacetime, try to visualize reality described by ten dimensions! I'll wait …
It's not possible to visualize a 10-dimensional reality, because visualization is, by nature, conceptual sensing in three dimensions. There’s the rub. You can no more fit a 10-dimensional square peg into a 3-dimensional round hole than you can square the circle.
And yet it is relatively straightforward to mathematically conceptualize systems of arbitrary dimensionality, because mathematics is not constrained by visualization. Mathematical dimensionality is a generalization of the 3-dimensional visualization concept. This generalization is analogous, albeit in the opposite direction, to the simplification of 2-dimensional rendering for 3-dimensional objects, as is routinely accomplished in graphic imaging (e.g., above image).
What if we generalize not only the traditional 3-dimensional concept of visualization to its associated multi-dimensional mathematical concept, but also generalize the corresponding terminology, namely: generalize 3-dimensional visualization to multi-attribute mathematical analysis. This seems to me an enabling of interesting speculations.
If I may be so bold, I wish to consider the potential clarification enabled by thinking of 4-dimensional spacetime as "4-attribute" spacetime, instead. In so doing, I merely associate three of those attributes with the three dimensions of space, and the forth attribute with what BigAl called the "fourth dimension" of time. Seems less confusing, n'est-ce pas?
Here is my really bold speculation: Suppose that the 10-dimensional spacetime of string theory is conceptualized as our 10-attribute reality itself! I have coined such a description of reality "Super-Spacetime Reality".
Now for some fun speculations. What specifically would I attribute to those impossible-to-visualize additional six dimensions of string theory? Well, instead of how they are usually conceptualized (point-like "curled-up" dimensions), suppose we imagine they are those attributes of reality for whose existence we currently have no explanations.
For instance, what if symmetry, a very commonplace attribute of reality for whose existence we have no explanation, is in fact one of those six exotic dimensions that string theory postulates? Another intrinsic attribute of our reality is entropy, a fundamental concept of thermodynamics and information theory, but whose raison d'etre is unknown.
Yet another very interesting property of both animate and inanimate objects is the propensity for synchronization. That propensity is a form of the propensity for self-organization, namely the spontaneous emergence of order out of chaos. It is possibly the essence of negative entropy. And like entropy, negative entropy or "negentropy" (as Schrödinger termed it) may also be an attribute that can be linked with one of the six additional dimensions of string theory.
What fun it is to speculate reality's in sight. Oh, such jingling of bells and whistles …
Post 1,996 “Super-Spacetime Reality”
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