Dimensions
Man is the measure of all things
Protagoras
Another reason why ‘time’ can’t be the fourth dimension is that the position has already been taken by the hypercube (or tesseract).
When I came across this oddity, I was baffled by how science seemed to accept two entirely different entities as being representative of the fourth dimension. I understand that the ‘time’ of spacetime is handled by a different sort of maths from the maths of the hypercube. But so what? Is ‘time’ the fourth dimension, or the hypercube? It can’t be both.
See what you think…
- Begin with a point. A point has zero dimensions.
- Stretch the point out into a 5cm line. A line is, by definition, one-dimensional. The dimension is ‘length’. Sit a second identical line on top of it.
- Next, grab hold of the top line and move it upwards from the other one for 5cm. Now join both left hand ends together; and both right hand ends. You now have a square (or ‘plane’) with four sides of 5cm. A plane is two-dimensional: length and breadth.
- Next, apply a suction pad to the plane and draw it away, again for 5cm. Joining corners together, you now have a cube (or ‘volume’) with all six sides of 5cm. A volume (or ‘solid’) is three-dimensional: length and breadth and height.
I guess you will see the pattern here… Take the original item and extend it at right angles to itself, thus adding an extra dimension. By logic, surely the fourth dimension must be ‘at right angles’ to a cube? But how can there be something at right angles to a cube? It doesn’t make sense. Well, not quite. It does make sense mathematically, but our 3d brain systems are unable to completely ‘see’ the result. Try this, though…
- Attach six suction pads, one to each surface of the cube and extend them all outwards. You now have a sort of cube in a cube. Try Bing Videos or search ‘hypercube (or tesseract) animation’…
This oddity seems to me to be a more rational (if barely conceivable) candidate for the job of representing the fourth dimension than ‘time’ is. If nothing else, it follows an established rational mathematical series, and although we can’t quite grasp it, we can sort of see that it might exist, just beyond our grasp, whereas the other candidate, ‘time’ simply doesn’t exist at all.
§ Another way of attempting to get a handle on the 4-d world is to consider that a shadow is a poor 2-d ‘reflection’ of a 3-d reality. So maybe our 3-d world is similarly a ‘shadow’ of a spectacularly ‘more real’ 4-d reality. Perhaps sunshine is the shadow of ‘Reality’. This would fit the pattern, and it would make some sort of sense of the seers’ and visionaries’ reports that the Higher World is utterly beyond description.
So if ‘time’ is not the fourth dimension, whither spacetime and all the calculations which are based upon it, including String or M Theory, which requires 10 or 11 dimensions, some of which are curled up in corners? But the maths of x2, x3, x4… tell us that a higher dimension must be hugely greater than its predecessor. A line contains an infinite number of points; a plane contains an infinite number of lines; a cube contains an infinite number of planes; thus, a hypercube/tesseract is going to contain an infinite number of solids, or volumes. Upwards and onwards, adding a fresh infinity every time. How can the eighth or ninth dimensions curl up somewhere, or be anything other than higher upon higher levels of infinities as are their more lowly predecessors in the series?
§ Again according to Einstein’s War, Einstein declared that the ‘a/ether’ was a ‘superfluous’ concept according to the requirements of relativity. The a/ether was claimed by the wisdom of the day to be the sole unmoving element in all creation. But Einstein said it could not be unmoving if we wanted the Laws of Physics to be truly universal.
But.. if the a/ether is the true fourth dimension (of infinite volumes) as per the mathematical ‘x1, x2, x3, x4….’ schema, then we may make no dogmatic claims in advance about the motility or otherwise of this unknown element of reality.
Theosophy claims there are many planes, sub-planes and sub-sub-planes etc of the Higher world(s), each one relating to a different vibratory rate. We already posit an infinite number of vibes in the electromagnetic continuum (‘Light’). So, maybe there are infinitely grading vibes or planes, which somehow flip over into dimensions at certain ‘quantum’ points?
Oparin noted that in the present world we see many species, but fewer when we look at the fossil record. Thus, if we follow the ‘v’ or ‘cone’ backwards in time we must arrive at a point of origination, where Life began. The notion of the Big Bang follows a similar logical path.
What the cone represents here is an Effect emerging from a point but without a Cause.
A Yogi would suggest that the Cause of all Matter, from particle to universe, derives from Higher and more intelligent realms, from which the Energies necessary to produce our 3-d Matter are stepped down via chains of transformers (‘chakras’)
So, he might say, if you put ▲ next to ▼, you have Cause and Effect neatly described: ►◄. The point of connection, between the two cones, is the point of what we call ‘creation’.
Connect the two cones and you get:
The symbol for infinity looks very similar, and could be similarly interpreted:
Two spheres or worlds linked which again looks very similar to the Christian mandorla in Chapter 17.
Interestingly, if you run the ‘Higher ►’ and ‘Lower ◄’ across into each other
…you get the Star of David again, in which the Higher and the Lower worlds are absolutely united, this time using more realistic (if badly drawn) 3-d cones rather than symbolic 2-d triangles.
I don’t know how science came to mistake ‘time’ for something real, but it may go back to Descartes. One of the great man’s achievements was to invent a way of pinpointing how two variable sets of numbers relate to each other. In other words, he invented ‘the graph’. A typical graph, to show the rate at which heat is lost from a sizzling badgerburger, has units of temperature along the vertical line of the graph, while the horizontal line carries units of ‘time’ (‘minutes’, say: as conveniently used for comparing one condition/event [ie, samples of the gradual mechanical process of heat loss] against another).
Very useful for metallurgists, cannon makers, industrial blacksmiths, etc. The point here is that ‘time’ is represented as an apparently real entity, rather than a convenience for measuring before-and-after conditions of a complex train of physical events, and hereafter continues to be considered as ‘real’ by mathematicians and physicists.
§ Note again: the ‘regularly-spaced’ ticks of a clock do not represent ‘time’. They might be of any length at all (remember the Egyptians’ extendable hours?), and are merely our attempt to regularise and formalise what we’ve come to think of as the passage of ‘time’.
As maths progressed, the original x (horizontal) and y (vertical) axes of a graph were supplemented by a z axis, which came up out of the page, at right angles to the other two. Now, any point in a space could be identified by three numbers. A backpacker’s map can pinpoint any pub on the planet with just two numbers, read off the x-horizontal, and the y-vertical scales. If you could add a third, perpendicular, axis you could pinpoint any place in the air, at any height above any pub on the planet. Useful for a hang-glider picnic rendezvous. Now then…
Physicists want to plot sequences of events. In other words ‘at which point in ‘time’ did each event occur, practically speaking?’ This called for the perfectly valid addition of a fourth axis to the graph system (but completely imaginary this time, as you have no hope of drawing something at right angles to something which is already at right angles to the page). An illustration of its usefulness might be that if you want to put a smart bomb through Captain Evil’s window at precisely 1.32pm, when he will be having his lunchtime sherry and puppy sandwiches, you can pinpoint your target precisely by programming your bomb with four numbers: you locate the building with an x and a y reading; then locate the correct floor of the building by adding a z reading. You can then pinpoint the snarling Captain by adding a t reading of 1.32pm for ‘time’. These four locating numbers are called ‘Cartesian coordinates’ and are really useful in day to day activities.
By this point ‘time’ has become thought of as something other than it really is (‘nothing’) by virtue of its practical usefulness on a graph, and having a whole new (fourth) axis named after it. The notion of ‘time’ as the real fourth dimension (as opposed to ‘graphical’ or ‘notional’) gradually became unquestioned, and led eventually to the notion of ‘spacetime’ and the confusion which seems to surround it.
Esotericists claim that the fourth dimension is the Etheric/Astral world: a real place, of refined physical nature, containing an infinite number of volumes (each with a specific ‘vibe’ in the local continuum, as per when we tune into radio programmes) in which entities live, and in which events occur according to choice (Mind) plus Cause and Effect. The Mental world is the fifth dimension, and so on. Some reports by people who claim to have experienced the Astral world (in lucid dreams, OOBEs, NDEs, etc), suggest that in it planes/volumes can overlap and interpenetrate.
§ This overlapping may be a result of their own wavering focus: not being powerful or ‘mindful’ enough to ‘hold the vibe’; perhaps similar to our own paranoid schizophrenics who have trouble distinguishing between two realities. Mediums are skilled at making the distinction. The erratic appearance of ghosts may also refer to ‘wavering focus’.
§ If ‘spacetime’ is just an elaboration of the old Cartesian coordinate theme, then it might be seen as a ‘Materialist 4d’: ie, an elaborated 3d, while the real 4d is the ‘original’ x4 of infinite volumes.
Mind and matter
Physics can’t reconcile the Physics of the Huge (Einsteinian relativity) with the Physics of the Tiny (quantum mechanics). Thus one of them or maybe both of them must be wrong in some way. Relativity requires ‘spacetime’, and as ‘time’ doesn’t exist, perhaps that’s where error has crept in. Quantum mechanics is an odd world in which some theorists claim that time can run backwards, along with other counter-intuitive processes. I wonder how the equations work once ‘time’ is perceived as a) not the fourth dimension and b) non-existent? Then it doesn’t run anywhere, and we are left simply with Things, Movement, and Cause + Effect (including the Effects of Mind: attention, desire, will, etc).
§ ‘Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it.’ Niels Bohr, Nobel Prize physicist.
‘Anyone who claims to understand quantum physics is a liar or a fool.’ Richard Feynman, also a Nobel Prize physicist.
Both men suggest that quantum physics appears to be beyond reason. But what if we remove ‘time’ as being the fourth dimension?
If the hypercube model really does represent the fourth dimension, it would help to account for some of the effects reported in the world of psychical research in which things seem to leap instantly out of or into sealed containers: from one volume to another one, which seem unconnected in the 3-d world but which might well be connected in the 4-d one (as per Lyall Watson’s report in Lifetide of seeing a tennis ball turn inside out before his eyes?)
The ‘impossible’ interlacing of the limbs of the Star of David also suggests some reference to a Higher dimension in which things apparently unlinked are, or may be, linked.
(Picture thanks to ?)
It might also help to explain the quantum condition of ‘entanglement’ which seems to show that one particle can be in two places at once, or that two apparently separate particles are somehow in intimate touch.
§ For a fuller account of the relative conditions of life in various dimensions, try Charles Hinton’s paper from 1884. Free to read online at
http://www.scribd.com/doc/16775059/Selected-Papers-of-Charles-Hinton-About-theFourth-Dimension-Hinton
Also Flatland by Edwin A Abbott.
But the most intriguing Yogic/Esoteric connection with the quantum world is in the area of Mind.
It is held by quantum physics that a sub-nuclear entity might be considered to be either a particle or a wave, depending on how you choose (note: ‘choose’) to measure it. In the end, Mind decides on what is there. Mind forms reality.
I don’t think any quantum physicist would quibble with that statement (although he might baulk at the baldness of its universal implications). Neither, of course, would any Yogic/Esoteric philosopher, but he would beef it up from the realm of the physically sub-microscopic, and into the multi-dimensional stratosphere of the Higher worlds. A human mind choosing whether a tiny blip manifests as a wave of energy or a particle of matter is very small beer to a Yogi’s thinking: but entirely consistent with the principle of ‘Mind Creates’.
One thread of quantum theory thinks that before the wave/particle finally ‘collapses’ into one ‘reality’, it exists as a sort of potential in a vast web of possible conditions. It is Mind which then causes the ‘collapse’. This is remarkably similar to a medium’s problem of trying to pin down one Effect from a vast web of karmic possibilities.
§ Dr Fred Allen Wolf in The Dreaming Universe says of ‘the observer effect’: ‘the more a quantum mechanical state is observed in a particular state, the more likely it is that it will remain in that state’, which is precisely the way a Yogi would explain the creating of a thoughtform. Attention leads to fixity (as in ‘practice makes perfect’).
Materialism hits yet another paradox in the quantum world, in that it insists that Matter created Mind, but is then faced with the quantum insistence that Mind determines Matter. There is no way to explain this runaway loop of perpetual paradox short of admitting that Materialism is a mistake. A Yogi might also suggest that the problem physics has in uniting gravity with the other three ultimate forces of physical matter/energy could be resolved by thinking of gravity as a Higher force which is concerned with ultimately re-uniting (‘yoga’/’re-ligare’) all the polarised and thus separated opposites in the 3-d physical world. Remember that circular diagram of Downcurve. Bottomcurve and Upcurve?
Pattern again
An atom bomb proves that a tiny amount of matter can release vast quantities of energy from within itself. But nobody has ever run the equation the other way round, to convert energy into matter, apart from a few fleeting ghostly particles.
It strikes me that it is never going to be possible to create ‘real’ matter from energy because E=mc2 takes no account of ‘p’ for pattern. Energy is patternless, but matter has pattern (‘design’), so to get matter from energy we need to understand the pattern (‘form’) that needs to be first formed and then infilled. Nonsense? Idealism says ‘not at all’, and it’s a fact that nobody has yet synthesised an atom from scratch.
§ It took the energy in just 0.6gm of uranium235 to kill 80,000 people in a flash at Hiroshima. That’s about as much matter as in a generous pinch of salt.
One day the issue of pattern/form/design will be upgraded from the elephant in the corner to its place at the head of the table as people begin to admit the ‘p’ of pattern. But how can one integrate ‘Mind’ into physics?
Consciousness again
We are self-conscious beings, and do not require proof of consciousness offered by priest or scientist. We Know we are free to choose our own behaviour (apart from a few desperate Materialist theorists), and that we are capable of great acts of creativity. Science, at the quantum level, would agree with us here: Mind creates, or at least ‘formulates’, meaning that ‘form’ is allocated by Mind, just as Plato said, 2,500 years ago, and Darwin echoed 150 years ago (requiring ‘a Creator’ to ‘breath’ life ‘into a few forms or into one’, in the final sentence of Origins). Thus by elementary logic: if no Consciousness, no Mind; no Mind, no form. If no form, no… thing: no universe, no-thing, including ‘time’.
It does look as though ‘time’ really is only an artefact of Consciousness. It is unreal, but is handy for mathematical models and engineering. A snare and delusion for physical theories of reality, however.
§ ‘As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.’ Max Planck, ‘the father of the quantum’.
Modern bootstrap and S-Matrix theories seem to have gone even further than Planck. An atom, or indeed a proton or a photon may be better considered as a (fleetingly) temporary ‘event’ than as a particle (see eg The Tao of Physics, Fritjof Capra.)
A Paradigm fit for Burning
The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them
Albert Einstein
Science is a broad church full of narrow minds
Professor Steve Jones
In the Idealist/Esoteric/Yogic/DarwinPlus view of Reality I now saw a philosophy that would one day change the world. Thus:
1. Materialism is demonstrably mad.
2. Idealism/DarwinPlus is not mad. It also:
3. Is compatible with all the events and structures of the observed world that science is concerned with, and
4. Goes at least part of the way towards explaining not just ghosts, but ‘supernatural’ and paranormal effects that everyone knows are there, but which Materialist Science refuses to acknowledge or investigate.
5. It can also incorporate the fundamental tenets of all religions, and even
reconcile large areas of Western philosophy.
Some strange ideas here. Do they have some merit? If you think so, please spread the link bad-dogma.org to friends and the www in general.