clifford_a-_pickover_surfing_through_hyperspacebookfi-org
clifford_a-_pickover_surfing_through_hyperspacebookfi-org
clifford_a-_pickover_surfing_through_hyperspacebookfi-org
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DEGREES OF FREEDOM<br />
-11<br />
Although philosophers have suggested the implausibility of a fourth dimension,<br />
you will see in the following sections that higher dimensions probably<br />
provide the basis for the existence of everything in our universe.<br />
Hyperspace and Intrinsic Geometry<br />
The fact that our universe, like the surface of an apple, is curved in an<br />
unseen dimension beyond our spatial comprehension has been experimentally<br />
verified. These experiments, performed on the path of light<br />
beams, shows that starlight is bent as it moves across the universe.<br />
—Michio Kaku, Hyperspace<br />
Imagine alien creatures, shaped like hairy pancakes, wandering along the surface<br />
of a large beach ball. The inhabitants are embedded in the surface, like microbes<br />
floating in the thin surface of a soap bubble. The aliens call their universe "Zarf."<br />
To them, Zarf appears to be flat and two-dimensional partly because Zarf is large<br />
compared to their bodies. However, Leonardo, one of their brilliant scientists,<br />
comes to believe that Zarf is really finite and curved in something he calls the<br />
third dimension. He even invents two new words, "up" and "down," to describe<br />
motion in the invisible third dimension. Despite skepticism from his friends,<br />
Leonardo travels in what seems like a straight line around his universe and returns<br />
to his starting point—thereby proving that his universe is curved in a higher<br />
dimension. During Leonardo's long trip, he doesn't feel as if he's curving, although<br />
he is curving in a third dimension perpendicular to his two spatial dimension.<br />
Leonardo even discovers that there is a shorter route from one place to another.<br />
He tunnels <strong>through</strong> Zarf from point A to point B, thus creating what physicists<br />
call a "wormhole." (Traveling from A to B along Zarf's surface requires more time<br />
than a journey that penetrates Zarf like a pin <strong>through</strong> a ball.) Later Leonardo discovers<br />
that Zarf is one of many curved worlds floating in three-space. He conjectures<br />
that it may one day be possible to travel to these other worlds.<br />
Now suppose that the surface of Zarf were crumpled like a sheet of paper.<br />
What would Leonardo and his fellow pancake-shaped aliens think about their<br />
world? Despite the crumpling, the Zarfians would conclude that their world<br />
was perfectly flat because they lived their lives confined to the crumpled space.<br />
Their bodies would be crumpled without their knowing it.<br />
This scenario with curved space is not as zany as it may sound. Ge<strong>org</strong> Bernhard<br />
Riemann (1826—1866), the great nineteenth-century geometer, thought<br />
constantly on these issues and profoundly affected the development of modern