Way Out Physics Shit
I've been thinking a lot about physics and thinking quattro-dimensionally. Someone told me to read this apparently awesome book called Flatland, but I'm a first-principles kind of guy, so lets dive in.

What does a one-dimensional cross-section of a two dimensional object look like from a one-dimensional perspective? An impenetrable barrier on the dimension that we're viewing from.

What does a bidimensional cross-section of a tridimensional object look like from a two dimensional perspective? An impenetrable wall around an area.

What does a three dimensional cross-section of a quattrodimensional object look like? Probably very similar to an atom, if you think about it. Completely indescribable with normal rhetoric, following rules of operation that don't make sense at the macro scale. We can take an atom apart, look at it in all of its three-dimensional glory, but its behaviors don't make sense unless you think about it as a four-dimensional object. Much like a two-dimensional cross-section of a three-dimensional object will change bizarrely as you move and rotate the viewing plane through the object, so too do atoms exhibit behavior that only makes sense if you think of them like a two-dimensional person might think of three dimensional objects.

I start with this little thought-project as a way of introducing a neat way to think about the universe. The Grand Unified Theory seeks to explain all the forces that operate on mass at supermicro to supermassive scales in the same framework with math. I have a thought experiment that I use instead of math, because I don't understand general relativity math.

Lets take a step back and look at light. For some reason, there's a computational limit on how fast light moves around the physical universe. During normal universal computation (meaning under normal rules of physics) light propagates across the substrate of the universe at a speed that is static from any frame of reference. Bizarre, right?

We know that this mysterious force we call Gravity operates instantaneously. We've done complicated things with perfectly spherical balls in orbit to prove this, but the basic idea is that if an object could suddenly change its mass, the gravity effects from the change in mass wouldn't even ripple through spacetime, the gravitational effects of the mass change would happen instantaneously.

The ramifications of this are seriously insane from a Newtonian or even an Einsteinian perspective. Most explanatory stories that deal with spacetime have to do with arriving before the light from your travel arrives, but this is a lame and poorly-thought out scenario and I will explain why right here. The geometry gets a little hairy, but I'll do my best.

In this thought experiment, we're going to do away with inertia. We're doing this in the same spirit that we did away with friction in high school Newtonian physics classes, in order to look more precisely at higher-order behavior.

If you arrived on the surface of a planet traveling faster than the speed of light and stopped instantly (remember, we're forgiving ourselves inertia in this experiment), what would it look like from the perspective of an observer near where you arrive? Because you're traveling faster than the speed of light, you aren't going to "arrive" in the classic sense of the word; you'll be traveling faster than the light bouncing off of your ship will. However, you will be reflecting light from a single point. At every point along your axis of travel, you will reflect all of the light that would have scattered off of the surface of your ship. From the outside, there would be a single instant where a perfectly bright reflection of all of the light from the surface of your ship would trace your path of arrival, and right down to your ship on the field. In the same way that a black hole is a singular point of space, this line would exist for a single moment of time. It would literally exist and then not exist, faster than we can describe (I think, but it might be a function of how much faster than the speed of light you're traveling. I know that physicists are obsessed with measurement, but I'm operating from a single perspective, that of the three-dimensional observer).

Now we have to go back to gravity, the magical instantaneous force that underpins the whole universe. The only way to diddle with gravity that we're really aware of is to mess with the mass of objects. The reason that gravity is so hard to fit into normal physics is because of time. Gravity, like quantum entanglement, happens at infinitely small timescales. Instantly, for all intents and purposes. Mathematical physics tries to reconcile the forces of electromagnetism, gravity, the strong force &c by comparing their behavior at different scales with different amounts of energy.

I think that a better way to think about the physical forces in the universe is like so: the universe is expanding, and it's just stupid to think about the expansion of the universe as anything but the effect of the time-analogue in higher-dimensional math. Instead of working with this though, scientists insist on searching for Dark Matter, which seems to me like utter phrenology. Well, it's mysterious and it's inflating the three-dimensional universe like a circle drawn on the outside of a balloon, they say, neglecting to mention that the ink of the marker of the circle on the outside of the balloon has nothing to do with the increasing radius of the circle. Rather, the balloon is increasing because we're inflating it. Reapplying the metaphor to our tridimensional universe, something is inflating the 4-dimensional balloon that our three dimensional universe exists on the outside of.

Because gravity happens instantly over infinite distance, that means that every particle in the universe knows where every other particle in the universe is at every moment, otherwise how could the universe hold together? If gravity had a time-lag at large distances, the macro forces that make galaxies and keep galaxies in larger ordered bodies wouldn't do what they do in our universe. Take just a little theoretical step in the direction that physics is trying to move in, and say that all of the forces that we understand in the world are really different manifestations of the same force. This is not at all a huge leap of faith when you sit down and ask "what is heat?" The answer as it turns out, is one of those scientific revolving doors where the answer is "energy", but asking "what is energy" leads you back to "well, energy is exchanged between particles and generally exhibited as light or heat or extremely energetic rays". Circular, you see.

Whereas if you think about all of these forces as various three-dimensional cross-sections of other, higher-dimensional behavior. Consider the lightspeed limit: nothing moves faster than electromagnetic waves in our understanding of the universe, except for gravity. Since gravity seems to ignore time, this gives us an interesting philosophical avenue to explore: gravity is like a conduit between every particle and every other particle in the universe; somehow gravitational information steps outside of our three-dimensional paradigm and certain kinds of information propagate instantly around the universe. But, there's all sorts of other, three-dimensional information that needs to propagate around the universe as well and all of those interactions are limited by the computational speed of three dimensional existence: lightspeed!

So we have some information that propagates instantly (gravity) and we have some information that propagates at the limit for 3D behavior (light, microwaves, heat, electromagnetism of all kinds, basically all the forces that we've managed to get a small degree of mastery over). Other philosophers have proposed that we look at our universe as a 3D cross-section of a larger more complicated universe.

When you start to understand how all of the atomic shit that goes on in our universe happens instantaneously, the "time is a hallucination of 3D beings" argument begins to make a little sense. Consider how uranium decays into lead. 3D beings cannot ever look at a single atom of uranium in a bigger pile and say "this atom will decay at this time", rather we have to say "this proportion of these radioactive atoms will decay into these other, inert atoms over this period of time". There's a fundamental uncertainty about the universe that we inhabit; we have a great deal of control over the forces that are inherent to normal 3D life, but next to none over forces that transcend time.

When you wrap your head around atomic theory, and start to understand how what we think of as solid matter is just the repulsion of atomic fields, how nothing actually exists, the spirituality of the great thinkers starts to make sense. "We are all one, treat your neighbor as yourself, transcend the individual" all makes a great deal of sense when you look at the Big Bang. Everything everything everything was confined in a single point of existence: all the atoms, all the protons, all the neutrons, all the electrons all existed in the same point of space. Because the actual size of these particles verges on the infinitely small, under the right circumstances (e.g., pre-Big Bang) it's perfectly sensible to think of everything the universe is made up of crammed into the same point in spacetime.

If you start to think like that, the nature of reality starts to get really creepy. Everything we understand as "real" and "concrete" is simply the product of the interactions of probabilities. We rely in large part on our eyes to tell us how the world works, and they are simply light sensors. At their most fundamental, what we see is simply the probability that an electromagnetic field with the following frequency and energy will bounce off of the probability field that defines an atom's outer electron shell.

If you think about your eyes as devices for interpreting waves (or vectors) of probability bouncing off of fields of probability (which IMHO is the best way to think about visual perception), then the nature of the inherent not-thereness of the universe starts to make sense. Yes, Jonathan, what I'm trying to say is that the universe is made up of a whole lot of calculations of probability running on a 4-dimensional universe substrate. Except that in a 4 dimensional paradigm you have to think of all of time happening at the same moment. Everything existing concurrently, basically. The quantum computers that we're building right now do the same thing; they exist in all of their possible states at the same time, and using complicated technology, we set them up to factor huge numbers. Imagine this: if 3D people set up quantum computers to resolve the mathematical problem of factoring (which is hindered by the brute-force problem and how time effectively ruins the brute-force solution), you can think of the universe as a quantum computer set up to simulate all of the possible states that the universe could exhibit at the same time. This is totally compatible with standard multiverse theories.

I have to brush my teeth now; this took forever to write.