A visit of sorts - nD musings

It will take around 14,000 million years to travel to the edge of the observable Universe, even if we travel at the speed of light. 

The operative word here is observable. This fact never ceases to astound me. How distressingly small are we! It is as if the Universe and its existence is this wondrous machine and we on Earth have access to one tiny part of it. And with our limited resources and our exposure to that tiny part, we are trying to fathom how the entire machine works...

This may never happen because we are limited by our abilities. For example, we know that some animals and birds can see colors that we can’t see or hear sounds that we can’t hear. There may be countless other such things  we may never know of. So how can we understand something if we are not aware that it is there?

Moreover, we are limited to a mere three dimensions (apart from time) while the Superstring Theory accurately predicts ten dimensions of space and time in existence. Think of the huge limitations we face because of this!

Just as an example of what we might be missing, imagine a 2D world like a sheet of paper. Take a look at this picture I’ve painstakingly drawn. Person A (the one with a red left arm and a green right arm ) can never assume the position of person B (arm color reversed) in a 2D scenario simply because there is no height or rather the space to make the transition. Left and right cannot be interchaged on a 2D surface. But we in 3D can lift him up, simply flip him over and he can be converted to person B. So what seems impossible in a 2D world is easy in 3D.

Interestingly, A can be converted to B if he moves on a Mobius Strip (see pic). Just take a strip of paper, twist it in the center and join the edges. So if A moves along the surface of the strip, even in a 2D world, he can flip over. So it is possible, after all...Wouldnt it be awesome if we too had something like this? Ive racked my brains enough to come up with a possible counterpart in 3D, but no avail. If you have any ideas, please tell me.

Imagine the miracles we can perform if we had access to just another dimension. But unfortunately, we can’t even imagine it :( Access to a fourth dimension would definitely give us God-like powers. For instance, we can walk out of closed doors, pass right through objects, see everything that happens on the Earth at any given moment, etc. To understand this, once again consider a person who is in prison in a 2D world (see pic). So for him to get out, the circle around him should be broken. But we in 3D can lift him out; wont it seem miraculous to the other people in 2D that he got out without breaking the circle? So think of similar miracles someone in a higher dimension can perform on us?

Ive thought a lot about this. Its very unsettling. The possibilities are unending. Think about this – we believe that our Earth is rotating and revolving around the Sun. What if someone from a higher dimension who can see it from outside in its entirety tells us that the Earth is actually stationary and it is everything else that is moving? Yeah, I know this is far-fetched :) But really, what if all our beliefs are false?

That’s anyways happening now - Space is flat is turning out to be a baseless assumption – we now find it more likely to be curved. Moreover, the shortest distance between two points need not be a straight line. It could be an interstellar chasm. Oh, the possibilities….

Anyhow, the laws of nature formulated on Earth seem counter-intuitive since they are fragmented and disparate, almost inelegant I would say. And by saying this, I mean absolutely no disrespect to all the brilliant theoretical physicists who spent their lives discovering and formulating them. All I am saying is that it seems as if they are the parts of a jigsaw puzzle which even after pieced together completely makes no sense. And that’s supposed to be the beauty of the fourth dimension - the laws have “space” to fit there and that one glorifying equation can emerge.

But speaking of nature, I think man is unnatural. This is my personal opinion – because as we know, nature always abhors a gradient but man totally thrives on it.