descartes extrapolated...

(Written: Sep 19 2003)

I was visiting my ancestral house last week when something struck me. You would have felt more or less like what I did if you cherish fond memories about places which are no more the same and will never be. You get that strange feeling when you are somewhere and are thinking about something that happened in the past precisely at the same place. Let me make myself clear. You would have seen it in bollywood movies. An otherwise good-looking lad with swollen eyes and a deliberate stubble drags himself into a park and breaks into tears when his eyes fall on a bench on which he used to sit with his sweetheart and stare at the moon. He walks as if in a trance towards the bench and reaches for her and WHOOSH!! She’s gone.
Got a hang of it? Well..mine wasn’t anything like it .
If you have read “the brief history of time” or any proof about space and time , what will strike you is that the time co-ordinate is treated exactly like the space co-ordinates . Stephen Hawking says that all the theories remain unchanged even if you interchange the time co-ordinate with any of the space co-ordinates.
Give some serious thought to ‘time’ and u feel it has nothing to do with reality. To feel what iam trying to make you feel, think about a simple 3D world ..there is nothing like ‘time’ there. Just a static 3D world. Now..what if this world had 2D intelligent beings. 2D in the sense that they perceive only the 2 spacial co-ordinates and move about in the 2 dimnsions and are as comfortable with it as we are with 3 spacial co-ordinates. Their sense of perception is as screwed up as ours. Though their world is 3D they can sense only one plane(2D) at any time. Each time they sense a different 2D plane. The planes are different with respect to the 3rd co-ordinate i.e the co-ordinate to which the plane is perpendicular. Wouldn’t the 2D beings comfortably call the third co-ordinate ‘Time’? Could they ever contemplate that the dimension they call time is exactly the dimension that we call (say) the z-coordinate? Would they ever believe that we move about in three dimensions? What would make them believe that we can actually go back and forth in the 3rd co-ordinate? Wouldn’t they perceive it as time travel? As far as they are concerned the 2D plane they sense is the only one that exists and when they sense a different plane the previous one is lost for ever.
I find it very very difficult to believe that we are any better than them. Think about it. How can reality be only 3 dimentional together with a stubborn ‘time’ dimension that is for some reason infinitely incomparable to the other 3 dimensions? This definitely must be an illusion. ‘Time’ has to be something as simple as the spacial co-ordinates, otherwise nothing makes sense.
I just realized that we have a couple of theories to hold on to. If it somehow occurred to one of the 2d beings that the planes that they perceive at different ‘times’ are infact parallel to each other wouldn’t he call them ‘Parallel universes’. It should not be very difficult ,then, to accept that there has to be infinite number of parallel universes each slightly different from the rest and that we continually perceive them in a sequence.If that has got the idea through then think about intelligent beings which perceive 4 spacial co-ordinates and 1 ‘time’ co-ordinate. Wouldn’t they be able to go back and forth along the 4th co-ordinate? Isn’t that what we would perceive as going across parallel universes and aptly call it ‘Time Travel’?
Well..any amount of crap can be fabricated by an idle mind. But this wouldn’t sound crappy if you consider one last argument.
Most of us feel like a wheel when we ask anyone who tries to explain the boundaries of the universe ‘What lies beyond?’. I don’t know how many of you are familiar with the latest explanation or if this is the latest at all.
If you had lived in an age when it was not thought of that the earth was infact spherical, how would you have explained the fact that you cannot find the edge of the earth and that earth was not infinite? The explanation to the edge of the universe is analogical. The problems arise when you think interms of 3 spacial co-ordinates and try to find a boundary to the universe in these 3Ds. You would be no better than a kid visualizing earth as a 2d plane and trying to explain why you cannot find the edge. If only the kid realized that the ends actually met at a different dimension and that we would go round and round if he started peddling till the edge, he would get back to better business on the spherical earth.
If it is not difficult to accept that we can go round and round on the surface of the earth,it should not be difficult to say the same thing about the universe. Wait….!!!would we then be travelling in the 4th dimension and back and forth in time……

There’s more…the discovery that the earth was roughly spherical sure cleared the doubts about the finiteness of earth but we still had to think about the universe and prove its finiteness using a higher dimension. By analogy shouldn’t we prove the finiteness of the universe of which this finite universe which is a 4D sphere is a part? But then that would take us to a 5d sphere!!!!GOOOOOD …Reality has to be infinite dimensional!!