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Six-Dimensional Space-Time Theory
eldavojohn writes "PhysOrg is covering an interesting year-old paper that proposes an alternative six-dimensional theory of space and time. George Sparling's proposition, based on Einstein's general relativity and Elie Cartan's triality, is a twistor space (which I've only read of in Roger Penrose's latest work). The gist is that space-time is modeled not by four dimensions but by six, and that the extra two dimensions are time-like. Sparling is hoping that tests from the Large Hadron Collider will help prove his theory. The paper is heavy but the PhysOrg article summarizes it nicely."
Time is four-dimensional, so there are 7 dimensions! So sayeth the TimeCube!
If ignorant of the almighty
Time Cube Creation Truth,
you deserve to be killed.
Killing you is not immoral -
but justified to save life on
Earth for future generations.
Academic taught singularity
within universe of opposites,
has lobotomized your mind.
You are Enslaved by Word -
no whip or shackle required.
You do not have the freedom
to discuss/debate Time Cube.
Academia destroys your mind
by suppressing opposite view.
God equals self masturbation
of mind - for opposites create.
You are educated singularities.
YOU DESERVE DEATH -
FOR SINGULARITY EVIL
in the Universe of Opposites.
No God Can Make Himself
as singularity is death, not life.
Planets nor human are entities
as they equal Zero Opposites.
You are educated singularity
stupid and evil, unfit for life
in the Universe of Opposites.
My god, it's full of time!
"All you have to do is be fragile and grateful. So stay the underdog." Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
Now there are three ways we can have dupes.
(watch me get modded down for mentioning Dig)
I just want to set an upper limit before everyone goes crazy.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I'm glad they're time-like dimentions! I'd hate to find out they're orthogonal directions, and suddenly have to worry about all my organs spilling out into the v and w dimensions. Or start filling a glass with water, only to discover I have to keep pouring until I had 1/8pi*r^4*height units of water. It'd just be inconvenient!
Speaking of which, anyone interested in some rather funny dimensional hijinks, you might want to check out Flatland the classic book, or one of the movies being made about the story.
Ryan Fenton
Hmm 6 dimensions, 3 of space and 3 of time...
Definately sounds like Jacob Burrough's theory (from the book by R A Heinlein)
Great, not only do we have to figure out how to travel through time, but now we also have to figure out how to travel through uime and vime!
An interesting claim made in the paper, but not mentioned in the PhysOrg writeup, is that this theory provides a co-ordinate free definition of chaos in spacetime. That is, for usual definitions of a dynamical system being chaotic, there is a preferred time co-ordinate describing the evolution of the system. General relativity, on the other hand, is remarkable because there is no single preferred co-ordinate system; everything works independently of the particular choice of co-ordinates to work in. As far as I can glean from the paper (it is very very dense) they simply define a chaotic system with regard to properties of the Chi operator, and claim that this conforms to the more restricted usual definition. This is far from clear to me -- I'm struggling just to get my head around their definition of Chi, let alone any implications of it -- but it would certainly be very interesting if true.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
There's, "Controversial and Open to Alternative Explanations", and then there's, "Insanity".
Spelling and language skills tend to decay the further toward the "Insanity" end of the spectrum one travels. Interestingly, I've read Right Wing screeds which don't fare much better in the language department. Learn to discern.
-FL
OK - I'm just messing with you. I have no idea - but I looked through a textbook at a UC Berkeley bookstore years ago with that title, with the picture of the logarithmic spiral, and liked the idea.
"The most sensible request of government we make is not, "Do something!" But "Quit it!"
What's that?? *SIX* whole dimensions? Why, when I was starting out, we only had three dimensions, and we liked it that way. Length, width, and height were good enough for us, and they should be good enough for anyone. Why, we sometimes had to work in just *two* dimensions -- *and they were both length*! You didn't hear *us* complaining about relativity or quantum effects. If it can't be expressed in a Newtonian physics, it shouldn't be expressed at all, that's what we said. Pretty soon you'll be inventing time travel and creating causality paradoxes and tearing apart the entire space-time continuum, and *then* where will we be, I ask ya? You young scientists these days, why, you have no idea what proper respect is.
And get off my lawn!
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
I thought that my judicious use of the non-existent words "uime" and "vime" would be the first clue that I wasn't very serious.
Of course mathematical models sometimes help us frame ideas about physical reality that we have trouble otherwise perceiving. Lorentz and Poincare developed much of the mathematics of special relativity as a mathematical model of electrodynamics using an "apparent time" that they viewed as an artificial mathematical construct necessary to make the model work. Einstein provided the insight that this "artificial" time was actually a real effect by making a conceptual shift about what simultaneity means, and special relativity was born.
For now the extra time-like dimensions are simply artificial creations of a mathematical model, we still await an insight to explain how they fit in with our own pereceptions of the universe.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
As usual, Rod predicted this:
"There is a sixth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area that might be called the Twilight Zone."
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
This sounds amazingly like the premise of a Heinlein novel, The Number of the Beast, which supposes that there are three dimensions of time as well as three dimensions of space, and that travel is possible on the two axes we normally do not recognize. This allows visiting realities that can be subtly or vastly different from our own, weighted by probability.
It's not a bad concept, but it does get rather silly when the selected locations include Barsoom, Oz, and the "Future History" realms of Lazarus Long. A bit like the plot in Frank Zappa's "The Adventures of Greggery Peccary", it attempts so much that none of it really comes off right. The main difference is that Zappa intended it that way (and backed it up with interesting, non-repeating music) and I don't think Heinlein did. He did intend it to be campy, but it's way beyond that.
I am willing to bet he is neither the first nor the last to propose this, but at least I can point out "prior art" where I see it.
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Of course, I'm an experimentalist, not a theorist, so I'm really just talking out of my elbow here.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
I agree, the brain is constantly predicting the muscle movements that will be required ~0.25 seconds into the "future". The communication lag between hand and eye becomes aparent when you see your keys in the boot as you are closing the lid. Even though you brain screams stop your hand keeps pushing for that split second too long, the prediction was wrong and the brain had no way to cancel the "close the lid" command. The "illusion" of time can also be demonstrated when you are in fear of your life such as during a car accident the driver will often expeience a slow motion effect as their brain goes into hyperdrive looking for a way out.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Hi, I'm not a physicist, and I didn't read the article, but I think I can help you out
Could that help explain human temporal perception (you can "feel" time slow down or time flies by when having fun)?
No
Can our consciousness span more or less of these other dimensions of time at need?
No
Would this help explain the apparent causality problem of neuromuscular control (humans seem able to send the neural command to catch the ball before our senses could have delivered the signal that it should be caught)?
No
Could the existence of extra time dimensions have implications regarding the existence of free will?
No
You're welcome.
Ephesians 3:14-19
If my call is important, why am I talking to a recording?
I've been rather fascinated with Peter Carroll's hypothesis of 6-dimensional space-time for a while now. He has a few dozen articles up at specularium.org
n t&task=view&id=26&Itemid=55&Itemid=1 ):
iirc he suggests that 3-dimensional space is curved in one of the extra time dimensions to form a finite, boundless 4-dimensional hypersphere, and 1-dimensional time is curved in the other extra time dimension to form a finite, boundless 2-dimensional circle.
He makes some falsifiable predictions based on his theory (from http://specularium.org/index.php?option=com_conte
9. Predictions from the Hyperwarp 6D model
a) No more generations of particles can exist. (Subject only to falsification)
b) No Higgs particle exists. (Subject only to falsification)
c) As it seems that no known natural process except, perhaps, neutron star or black hole collisions could cause a sufficiently large quantity of matter to undergo a sufficient acceleration to produce graviton bosons in detectable quantities, we shall never easily detect gravity waves (subject only to falsification).
d) The principle of t-axis neutrality does permit the existence of a number of exotic bosons corresponding to configurations such as :
d-quark/positron, or d-antiquark/electron or any type of quark/antineutrino or antiquark/neutrino
Within Hyperwarp 6D theory a "leptoquark boson" does not really represent a fifth force of nature, anymore than weak (W-, W+, or Zo) bosons represent anything other than a special case of electromagnetism. See Leptoquarks and Neutron Stars paper.
e) Spacetime singularities larger than fundamental particles do not exist. The quantisation of particle properties in terms of spacetime curvature implies a quantisation of spacetime itself and the top quark represents the maximum possible curvature at any point.
f) Neutrinos can annihilate against neutrinos in head on collisions. Antineutrinos can likewise annihilate against antineutrinos. Such collisions could create photon pairs or pairs of neutrinos of other generations. This controversial proposition lies open to experimental confirmation. It may also contribute a solution to the solar neutrino problem.
That's an easy one:
- spectacular (unlike subatomic particles physics ones which are observed only indirectly, over sensor arrays and computer imagery), high energy experiments, plus
- his own tendency to perform publicity stunts and make bombastic, yet sherlock-holmes-esque mysterious announcements (because... Tesla was independent, not academic researcher and was always on a hunt for venture capital) about his future work, plus,
- on top of it all his failure to accomplish something he announced, which could had been very revolutionary in every sense (perhaps most notable being social sense) of that word, apparently not because it was physically impossible, but because he was pulled back by "The Man", gave him an aureole of saint-like hero in eyes of a common man (as well as kooks).
There are numerous examples that oral traditions attach mythical supernatural (or at least greater than actual) powers to beloved heroes in collective folk memory. Tesla is one of most recent of such characters and perhaps first that transcended national and ethnic barriers (after all, in his own mind his public was global). Other notable popular hero figures are, of course, Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi, Bruce Lee, Mother Theresa,
The dimensions may not be quite what you think. This paper sounds to me very like technology which is already being used in games engines and robotics applications, eg for lighting models and collision detection.
The idea is that there are various things that make rotations of objects much nicer to handle than translations. But if you add some extra dimensions, you can turn the translations into rotations. It's to do with conformal projection. Translations on a 2D plane are difficult to handle (at least in the framework of Clifford algebra), but if you map that plane onto the surface of a sphere in 3D, then you can identify the 2D translations with rotations on the surface of the 3D sphere. Similarly, you can exchange 3D translations for rotations in 4D, if you create a new dimension which allows you to have an origin for your rotations which is lifted outside "real" 3D space. It turns out to be nice to be able to do rotations about a point at infinity, too, which you can achieve by doing the same trick to go up to 5D. A consequence is that each no-D point in 3D gets represented by a 2D surface in the 5D, a line gets turned into a 3D hypersurface, etc.
The nice thing about rotations is that you can do them with spinors, and you can use spinors to rotate lines and planes directly without having to break them down into points. In the 5D system you can also use geometric algebra to compute directly whether and how different hypersurfaces meet, again without having to compute points and normals and things, which is good for collision detection.
It looks to me that this article is doing pretty much the same trick, turning 4D into 6D, that the geometric algebra people are using turning 3D into 5D.
Here's a paper from a group at Amsterdam university discussing some of this stuff, using it for a ray-tracing program. See also the previous two papers in the series, here. They've also just got a book out, "Geometric Algebra for Computer Science" (links to Amazon etc).
There's also a company called Geomerics based in Cambridge in England that has used the technology to develop a new lighting engine, which it has just released for the Unreal platform.
All of that may have various degrees of truth to it, but you're being quite unfair by not mentioning that another key factor was that the things Tesla actually accomplished and demonstrated, many of which have found their way into our current common base of technology, were quite spectacular in terms of utility, innovation, and being leading edge for the time.
Many researchers, academic and independent, spend their entire lives trying to come up with just one useful idea. Tesla produced them regularly and dependably.
I often wonder what Tesla would have come up with if he was living and working in our current technological / scientific environment. In my view, the man seemed to think so far "out of the box" that you couldn't even find the box from where he was.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Actually Tesla created the equivalent of a waterwheel that tapped the energy of Earth's motion through the coelestial aether. However, the resulting drag force was larger than he'd predicted, and after his experiments introduced a full extra day in 1892 (February 31, 1892 - google it), he was forced to stop his experiments. The original wheel is still on display in his home town of Smiljan. On special occasions, it is started up and let spin freely, without an load attached.
Also, Tesla had to use the energy he'd stored up from the wheel (in a huge bank of capacitors - creating this was such a feat that the unit for capacitance is now named in his honour) to actually drive the wheel and restore the Earth's proper rotational period. Of course, the transfer wasn't without loss, which is why years divisible by 100 do not have leap days any longer.