TOE, Hyperspace and the 10th dimension.
Reading up on the numerous writing of physicist on the TOE (Theory Of Everything), especially with all the various intricate contending super string theories, one tends to get lost about how everything fits into the big picture. I find that Micho Kaku summary, in drawing a simplistic analogy as the best thought off and almost philosophical, the most beautiful yet.
Kaku would as child, visit the Japanese tea garden in San Francisco. He would be fascinated by the carp, who lived in a very shallow pond. Kaku then draws his analogy from this particular childhood memory. Simply put, he places us, humans, in the situation of the carps with our understanding of our universe limited to the third dimension, as the pond. The carp, living in ‘two-dimension space’, would only be able to swim forwards and backwards, and left and right the concept of “up”, beyond the lily pads, would be totally alien to them. How would the crap be aware of the world above them? One day it rained with the rain drops forming gentle ripples on the surface of the pond. The carp could see this and thus they knew. The third dimension would be invisible to them but they could clearly feel or see the vibrations coming from there. They might invent concept to describe this, called “forces”, giving them names, such as light and gravity. Today, many physicists believe that we are the carp swimming in our tiny pond, blissfully unaware of invisible, unseen universes hovering just above us in hyperspace. We spend our life in three spatial dimensions, confident that what we can see with our telescopes is all there is, ignorant of the possibility of 10 dimensional hyperspace. Although these higher dimensions are invisible, their “ripples” can clearly be seen and felt. We call these ripples gravity and light. Hyperspace theory however, languished for many decades for lack of any physical proof or application but recently is being revived for a simple reason that it may hold the key to the greatest theory of all time, the “theory of everything.”
May 29th, 2005 at 8:23 am
Ahh…the TOE, i’m kind of incline to belive that it’s a mere figment of human imagination, and i somewhat prefer bosonic string theory, because the presence of tachyons which are totally opposite when it comes to the momentum / mass equation simply because it affirms my faith in FTL, but then again it might just be like quatum state interaction, total real world bull after normalization is applied