Wednesday, September 15, 2010

20: Heresy in the 21C

I'm just about to fly to Australia, a journey 10,000 miles horizontally but just 6 miles vertically?! To prove my SI credentials, I could build a 10km square structure, but a cubic one would be impossible?! With such a huge energy differential between the two horizontal dimensions and the single vertical one how can we really doubt that we live in a 2D world! I could settle for two-and-a-bit dimensions; but no-way three!

Scientists tell us that the world is a sphere, and it does conveniently explains some of those nasty day-to-day visual effects like ships sailing over a horizon ... but we swallowed it; hook, line and sinker ... despite the fact that it doesn't really explain what holds the world 'up' or where space 'is'. In fact to suggest it might be as we see it, would be 21C heresy!

... Now 'up' there is Space, it is a different story. There, I can believe every direction is equally 'easy'; There I could build my 10km cube no-problemo. So are we really experiencing the interface between a 2D Earth and a 3D Space? Are living on a pile of detritus that has landed on our 2D domain over the aeons, elevating us a little into the third dimension. Enough that we are aware of it and can even manipulate it in small quantities? (Time is another dimension we are aware of, though in that case we have not learned to manipulate it in any significant way).

"But wait, if you carried on when you get to Australia you would end up back where you started ... surely that means the world must be round? And as you could do it in any direction, it must be a sphere!" Ok, but another explanation is that we live in a finite 2D space, such that any dimension beyond the horizontal limits of that finite space has no meaning (!), so attempts to travel beyond it brings you back to the start. Like an "Infinity Mirror" ... or The Universe. Those same scientists tell us the universe is actually "curved" back on itself (Explaining the uniformity of the background microwave radiation from the big-bang), and there is nothing outside it because outside it has no meaning. Hmm ... so why should this only happen at the macro scale? It suggest that gravity isn't a force, just the requirement for extra energy necessary to move an object from the 2D plane toward a 3D space ... Which might explain the difficulty detecting gravity waves, and also hints at the energy required to time-travel!

Actually a more famous frizzy haired guy said that planets do not travel on curved paths around the Sun, but along a straight paths. The presence of the large mass of the sun distorts space such that the straight path returned to an earlier point on itself ... ie behaves as if it was circular ... sound familiar? Of course 3D space is bound to be distorted in the presence of 2D space ... keil surprise; and you would expect big 2D spaces distort space more than small ones! So that puts planets as 2D surfaces progressing along 1D trajectories above other 2D surfaces; mostly unable to deviate from their 1D paths because to do so would require an increase of energy ... we see it as orbits!

"Now wait a minute ... Look at the Moon, you can see that that is a sphere!" No you don't, you see a flat surface ... The moon and the stars are on a flat plane ... or at least the inside of a large dome! And we see the effects of the 2D to 3D interface at the edges as the light travelling to us along a curved trajectory whilst travelling its straight path ... The same mechanism incidentally, which makes boats disappear 'over' a horizon. So it is actually quite reasonable that a 2D space which has no 3rd dimension (ie it has no "back") would appear spherical when located in and observed from a 3D space ... it is 2 dimensional from every perspective. As it is reasonable that a 3D space would appear 2D when observed from a 2D space.

1, 2, 3 and 4D spaces all occupying the same universe with nothing (whatsoever) outside it ... Inside we have Dimensions and Time alternate forms of energy in a vast emptiness. Periodically standing waves form in this energy and particles of matter spontaneously appear ... most promptly disappear, but some cluster together to produce us. Net energy ... no-change! The big bang just produced Dimensions and Time, stuff appeared in it because of ripples ... and because it had nowhere else to appear. And because all dimensions and time are its domain, then the stuff appeared in it wherever and whenever it felt like it.

... What noise does a Dimension/Time big-bang make? Because it is still happening today!

'They' say that truth is stranger than fiction; they also say to trust your own eyes. Science is littered with heretics who turned out to be heroes. Heretics see the same world that everybody else sees, but question the standard interpretation.

So even in these enlightened times, it takes courage to be a good scientist ... to stand in front of your peers and propose an orthogonal approach ... to risk ridicule or rejection as you do it. It still takes courage to tell the Emperor he is naked. But time and again scientific (and business) heroes emerge from re-statements of the blindingly obvious!

Cheers.ian

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