Higher Dimensions

I recently finished The Three-Body Problem, which I enjoyed a lot. I love science fiction, and this book in particular reminded me how much I love physics, something I had forgotten over the last 30-odd years amidst reading the dull prose of a few popular books I hoped would have the opposite effect. (Thinking Stephen Hawking among others.) But this book, no matter how unreal the “fiction” part really captured my imagination about what’s possible and fascinating. It made me want to think about it again.

I won’t give the story away in case you want to read it, but one example the author used was how those operating in higher dimensions might trivially peer into the private spaces of our present world, which to our perception consists only in three spatial ones plus time. Imagine a two-dimensional world on a large flat piece of paper. If you draw a circle on the paper, nothing outside the circle can get inside without crossing its boundary.

But a higher-dimensional being could trivially just step (or jump) over the boundary and into the middle. Hence someone in five-dimensional space-time might similarly be able to see through or enter our seemingly closed spaces by stepping “over” our enclosed structure from a dimension hidden from us.

. . .

I’ve started a new book called What Technology Wants about how what we view as technology is an extension of evolution itself, governed by similar axioms and even teleological aims. One contrast he draws between biological evolution and technology is that the former always proceeds stepwise, gradually and “in time” whereas the latter can take leaps “across time,” borrowing from earlier designs and erstwhile abandoned insights and inventions.

Biological evolution can only pass along genes that interact advantageously with the environment and abandons those that do not. But the scientific method, on which much of modern technology is based, allows us to incorporate insights that were ahead of their time, that didn’t initially make the cut. It enables us to gather inputs from anywhere, formulate theories and test their explanatory power against the results. It’s almost as if a new dimension of sorts were added to knowledge creation 350-odd years ago that allowed us to step over the boundaries in which we were formerly constrained.

. . .

The Three-Body Problem, written in 2008 (though there are sequels which I ordered and will start when they arrive), talks about even higher dimensions (buried outside our immediate reach at quantum scales.) Just as someone might step into the two-dimensional circle from the third dimension, perhaps someone can step into a six-dimensional hyper-shape from the seventh. If the scientific method could be said to advance us dimensionally, i.e., to have unlocked a previously unknown process for rapidly accelerating knowledge, one even civilizations as advanced as ancient Greece and Rome lacked, perhaps there are more fundamental modes of mind discoverable yet.

It’s easy to grasp that there are many things we don’t know about reality, but harder to wrap one’s head around the notion that like the ancient Greeks and Romans, despite our many concrete technological achievements, we lack even a basic understanding of the faculties needed to go about it.

As I said, these books got me thinking again.