Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Parallel Universes

Thanks to both Lost and math class moving past four variables/dimensions, I’ve been thinking some more about parallel universes and multiple dimensions of time. I have NO clue what I’m talking about, but it’s at least interesting to think about.

“Universes”—defined, I suppose, as 4D objects of 3 spatial dimensions and 1 temporal dimension—could be parallel in time, or in space… that is, separated in some 5th dimension which is either spatial or temporal. Right?

For instance, if reality “branches” in time continually… well, maybe that would mean that every possible decision was made, but at different coordinates along the 5th axis. (That’s kind of assuming we have free will, I guess.)

If reality “branched” in space continually… well, I guess that would be more along the lines of the “many worlds” envisioned in, say, Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy (The Golden Compass/The Subtle Knife/The Amber Spyglass).  These other worlds may be described as being very very very close to our own, but slightly separated in that 5th dimension. And they may be described as, potentially, entirely different, despite being so close—like a book of various photos taken all over the world.

That doesn’t really make sense. It would be more like a scatter plot than a continuous function, and I don’t see any reason why that should be the case. It makes more sense that the parallel worlds closest to our own would look very similar to our own, except some objects would be bigger, some would be smaller, and some would stay the same. The rates of change could be very different, of course, depending on slope with respect to this 5th axis.

So, sadly, the possibility of moving 1 mm along this 5th axis and discovering magical new worlds is slim. The book is more like a flipbook, with each page very similar to the last. But maybe if we travelled far enough… it could be a whole new kind of frontier! Of course, if the rest of the universe is 5-dimensional, then we probably are too… so that’d be a little weird. Well. It’d take some getting used to. Not as weird as you might expect, probably.

Along some axis we can’t see, perhaps the various cosmological constants that shape our universe change. Maybe the amount of dark energy (if it even exists) changes. If the expansion of our galaxy is dependent upon the amount of dark energy, and if the amount of dark energy is variable… well, maybe, to avoid a situation where the universe tears itself apart, or where it collapses, we could escape along this 5th axis to a dark energy “sweet spot” (red).

fateoftheuniverse

Maybe an extra dimension could be used for other things, like combating entropy by siphoning energy away from other parts of the universe (multiverse? megaverse? whatever…).

Or maybe we’re just stuck in our lonely four dimensions. I don’t see why there would be dimensions we can’t perceive. Then again, I also don’t see why there should only be 4 dimensions. What an arbitrary number! Maybe there are INFINITE dimensions! Why not? :)

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