clifford_a-_pickover_surfing_through_hyperspacebookfi-org

SATAN AND PERPENDICULAR WORLDS 65
"Professor Rudy Rucker of San Jose State University writes philosophically
on this precise topic":
Drawings use 2-D arrangements of lines to represent 3-D objects.
Why shouldn't we be able to build up 3-D arrangements of neurons
that represent 4-D objects? More fancifully, perhaps our minds are not
just 3-D patterns: maybe our brains have a slight 4-D hyperthickness;
or maybe our minds extend out of our brains and into hyperspace!
You reach into your glove compartment and remove a gray, wrinkled
thing stored in a formalin-filled jar to prevent decay. You give a little tap
on the jar marked "Einstein." His cerebrum jiggles like a nervous mango.
"Sally, the mammalian brain seeks to expand its dimension to fulfill its
biological purpose. For example, the huge 2-D surface of the brain is
intricately folded to fill a 3-D volume in order to increase its surface area.
Wouldn't it be a great science-fiction story that describes a human whose
3-D brain folds itself in the fourth dimension to increase its capacity?"
(Fig. 3.9).
You place the brain back into the glove compartment and withdraw a
chunk of Swiss cheese filled with tunnels that interconnect various
regions of the cheese.
Sally pinches her nose. "No thanks."
"Sally, maybe we could use other spatial dimensions for wormhole
travel."
"Wormholes?"
You nod. "Someday, wormholes might be used for wonderful journeys.
Some physicists believe that at the heart of all space, at submicroscopic
size scales, there exists quantum foam. If we sufficiently magnified
space, it would becomes a seething, probabilistic froth—a cosmological
cheese of sorts."
Sally runs her fingers through her hair. "Now, this sounds quite interesting.
What do we know about the quantum froth?"
Your heartbeat increases in frequency and amplitude as you gaze at
her skirt, the color of cool mint. "In the froth, space doesn't have a definite
structure. It has various probabilities for different shapes and curvatures.
It might have a 60 percent chance of being in one shape, a 20
percent chance of being in another, and a 20 percent chance of being in
a third form. Because any structure is possible inside the froth, we can