Speed Screed: Imagining the Tenth Dimension

One problem with dividing everything into “rants” and “raves” is that I don’t really have a neutral category. Obviously lumping things into “love” or “hate” is gross oversimplification that I use as a cheap draw. I may have to invent a new category for stuff that is simply interesting or informative, but that I don’t have a particularly strong opinion about. If I don’t have a strong opinion, you may find it boring, but at least I don’t have to pretend something is either wonderful or abhorrent. Not that I have yet. That’s called integrity. Ahem.

Anyway, I recently checked out this interesting video called “Imagining the Tenth Dimension” which was posted by the writer of a book of the same name, Rob Bryanton. It’s basically a technique that helps you wrap your head around some of the possibilities of the dimensions beyond the three (or four) that we experience, by using lower-dimensional analogies.

For example, if you collapse all of space into a point (i.e. three dimensions) then a line segment moving from that point to another is movement in the fourth dimension, which is roughly described as time (in truth I think it’s more complicated than the way it’s presented; the way the exercises handle time is a little too flippant) It’s an interesting exercise and I highly recommend it.

As a cautionary note though, this whole experience is really an exercise in philosophy and imagination than any sort of scientific model. I somehow doubt that a string theorist who works on Calabi-Yau spaces really considers the sixth dimension as movement between logically inconsistent realities. String theorists have more or less no physical evidence for their claims (though I still think the theory is a good one) so they use higher dimensions as a way to get the equations to balance out; in other words, string theory becomes a usable model when there is an assumption of ten (or eleven) dimensions, but I think they are viewed mathematically and not as “lines of travel” which is what this mental exercise basically assumes.

The author more or less admits that he is trying to reconcile philosophy and science in a certain fashion, but his spiritual and aesthetic side somewhat damages his scientific credibility. He also produced a series of songs that supposedly outline the key concepts of his book – but the man is not a professional songwriter so I felt mostly confusion at his attempts to use music. I felt that he was once again trying to blur the lines between rational discourse and intuitive spiritual belief. I personally believe that there is no such thing as an informative song – songs are not about transmitting information, at least, not in a form where it has any real-world use.

In short, I believe this is a good thing to watch in order to understand how lower-dimensional analogies can be useful in wrapping your head around things that seem impossible, but to take the entire thing with a grain of salt. Particularly telling was the way that he shaped the 10-dimension symbol like the Sefirot, the Tree of Life from the Jewish mystical tradition of Qabalah. Jumping to premature conclusions much?