A little different: Theoretical Physics

Some background: I was linked to this page: http://revver.com/video/99898/imagining-the-tenth-dimension/. I showed it to a few other people because I thought it interesting. I accepted most of it right of the bat as pretty logical.

Later, after most people had gone to bed, I was discussing it with my girlfriend. I had trouble understanding one part of it, which lead me to ask her to explain it to me. Eventually it got a bit more complex and I started having problems with other parts of the video and we decided to sleep on it.

I don't work that way, I can't exactly sleep on it. I pulled out a pen and paper and decided to get to work on it. The basic concept of it is string theory. The video goes from explaining a point in space to a point in time to a everything possible as a point. It starts out quite elegant.

A point is just that, a point. A dimension, therefore, is the line connecting those points. In the first dimension those points are one dimensional. They contain one piece of information which would be their point on said line. The second dimension contains the first dimension in it, and the same way that each point in the first dimension was connected by a single line, another line (being a one dimensional object) would be connected with the original line by the second dimension.

Long story short, two lines, the distance between them represents the second dimension. Another way of looking at it is two points that each represent the first dimension, and the line connecting those is the second dimension.

You can make the same jump to the third dimension, and you end up with the physical universe that we know and love. In fact, the only reason we get to the third dimension is because we live in it and can observe it and experience it. If there were only 2 dimensions then the argument I have made would stop at the second and not jump to the third, and I would continue from there. 

To understand what most people accept to be the 4th dimension, it is almost easier to treat three dimensional space as two dimensional so that one can imagine the 4th dimension with relation to the third as we relate the third to the second.

Going from the 2nd to the 3rd dimensions we add. If we have a 3 dimensional object represented in 2d, the 3rd dimension represents what the 2nd does not have. In this example, time. In the 2D world that represents the 3D world we live in you could imagine a series of 2D images side by side that would reflect change, and the progression of the object. The problem is physically we can't see this. If we were outside the 4th dimension we would be able to see it, unfortunately for string theory we are not. Most people do not have trouble understanding the 4th dimension but my explaination may not do it credit.

I have decided that I have a problem with this way of thinking. After watching the video and getting confused near the 7th and 8th dimensions, I watched it again. I got confused this time going from the 5th to the 6th dimensions. This got me thinking, what if the standard accepted idea of the 4 dimensions wasn't right in the video. Everything checked out so far, but clearly it wasn't enough for me. I tried to reason how the video got from each dimension to the next, how they defined each one.

They define it differently at different points throught the video, so therefore I had to come up with my own explaination. I came to several of them that were somewhat similar. First I thought of each higher dimension as having some sort of information the lower one did not. For example, a 3 dimension object contains 3 co-ordinates while a 2D object only contains 2. So with this train of thought we come to the fact that each dimension has some piece of information to be described that wasn't previously. This fell apart at the 5th dimension in the video. I realised that while sound it seemed, there was something missing from it. I moved on.

My current idea is the one that I feel has gotten me somewhere, however it's led me to a brick wall. My concept here is quite simple. Each object in a certain dimension seems to assume a value that the dimension above contains as a variable. An example would be best to demostrate this. In two dimension space objects have two co-ordinates, generally length and width. For all points that are two dimensional, they assume the third dimensional variable to be the same, which is what stops them from being three dimensional. An infinitely flat playing card assumes that across all of the infinite number of points on the card every single point shares the same "Z" co-ordinate.

I built on it, I went to us living in the third dimension and began to question time as the fourth dimension. If you follow this reasoning, which up to my current development of it seems credible, we come to the point that we are treating time as that variable. The three dimensions can vary as much as they want, but they assume the same "time" co-ordinate across all points. An example of this is a car. A car has an infinitely large number of points, each point follows three co-ordinates. We know of the "X," Y," and "Z" axes. But this object assumes all of another variable to be the same. It all exists in one point along the dimension of time.

To go beyond here, and this is where I'm a bit stuck, we need to think of something a little more abstract. We need to consider something that has a physical form in three dimensions and also represents a passing of time. What comes to mind right now is a falling tree. Each point of the tree at each point in time can be described using the 4 co-ordinates. It has the physical X, Y, Z co-ordinates and now a point in time to act as another reference. To get to the 5th dimension, we must think of what all those points assume to be the same. I cannot think of something without making arbitrary conclusions.

The video talks about possibilities, but I am getting to the point where I can't think of possibilities as contiguous the way the other dimensions are. For example, an object in three dimensions is completely contiguous with all of it's incarnations between it's first point on the time axis and it's last point on the time axis, there's no skips or jumps. Possibilities do not have that continuity.

I do admit that the reason for this is very likely the human mind just cannot fathom the number of different possibilities to the point that it can see a contiguous connection linking all of the possibilities across all time. Perhaps those possibilities come before the time axis. This was my original thought, but upon writting this and reasoning it out, I have gone back to the traditional way of thinking of time.

Taking a step back, I would like to examine the 3rd dimension and the 4th dimension again. What if we brought the scale up. What if instead of an object in the 3rd dimension, we talked about the entire universe as a single object? What if the universe was the third dimension? I find myself asking this question to myself now. Can the laws of physics be considered as one variable? If they can, why could the 4th dimension not be something similar to what I see in the 6th and 7th dimensions in the video mentioned above. Why can't the 4th dimension be the possibility axis.

Going over it I think the destinction comes down to: What is more logical, time assuming that all the laws of physics are constant, or that the laws of phsyics assume that time is constant? Perhaps another question: Must they be different? Can time be a part of the laws of physics in the terms of formulae and function?

There are so many questions I haven't answered and I think it to be something of a thought experiment. It might be something that I need to just sit down for an afternoon, sip some tea, and figure out logically.

I think I'll go back to thinking about it, but I leave you with this: If you ever seriously look at string theory, please take a look at what assumptions they make and how they make you look at certain connections they make. Ask yourself if they are logical or reasonable. Ask yourself if it makes sense or if they're jumping over things and saying them in such away you think you've grasped the concept but they haven't told you anything. If you watch the video from the beginning of this post, ask yourself exactly what they mean by the split and the fold. Try and figure out if it makes sense outside of our standard three-dimensional world. 

Back to the drawing board (or notebook) for me.