According to our primitive senses, we live in a 4-dimensional world. Three of these are spatial dimensions — if we look at a cardboard box, or a desk, or a fridge, we can see that it has height, depth, and width. The fourth dimension that we perceive is time, and it’s no small feat to truly get that time is a dimension just like height, depth, and width.
Now imagine somebody who just couldn’t comprehend that there are more than two dimensions (if it makes it more plausible, let’s say this person has no depth perception and cannot move their head in any way). They argue, “I can see left and right, that’s the first dimension, and I can see up and down, that’s the second dimension.” You try to explain the concept of depth, and they don’t understand. You try to explain the concept of time as a dimension, and they really don’t understand. Don’t even start about relativity theory because you don’t even understand that, so how on earth could they? They see life in this world like we see a photograph. Unchanging. Flat. An accurate but unliving, unenlightened representation.
But we’re not so enlightened ourselves, seeing the world in all its four-dimensional grandeur. Our prophets (physicists) have spoken with god (the universe) and apparently there are likely between 10 and 26 dimensions. Life as we know it is a flat representation of reality. A photograph. An unliving snapshot. We live in this universe and we cannot even begin to fathom the lush and vivid truth.
Now it’s time for some simple geometry. What is the volume of a square? Absolutely nothing. A square is a 2-dimensional object and therefore has no volume in a 3-dimensional world. That guy who could only perceive two dimensions in effect perceives nothing of our ‘4-dimensional’ universe. And we, seeing our four dimensions, perceive nothing of our (at least) ten-dimensional universe. Getting more technical, our ignorance can be seen as the 6-dimensional quotient space obtained by dividing the universe as it truly is by the universe we perceive.
Is this depressing or uplifting? I don’t know. It’s sad to realize that our ignorance does not just have magnitude, but is in fact a high-dimensional universe in and of itself. On the other hand it’s nice to think that there’s so much more to life and the universe than what we perceive.
Imagining the tenth dimension:
March 6, 2008 at 2:42 am
after watching this twice i thought i could comprehend it; kinda, for a second, maybe…
March 6, 2008 at 4:58 pm
[...] fact of my ignorance.” This is the tenet upon which agnosticism is built. The fact is that our ignorance is a universe unto itself, and it takes a good deal of critical though to understand [...]
March 9, 2008 at 3:15 pm
[...] fact of my ignorance.” This is the tenet upon which agnosticism is built. The fact is that our ignorance is a universe unto itself, and it takes a good deal of critical though to understand [...]