Michio Kaku is my new hero

Everybody knows that there are three dimensions of space, right? Length, Width, and Height (the names of such vary depending on who and where you are, but they are the same regardless). When I was younger, I remember thinking that Time should be the fourth dimension. I don't know whether I read that somewhere, though, given that A Wrinkle In Time actually involves a Tesseract (a 4-dimensional hypercube unfolded into 3-dimensional space) I would suspect that I came to this conclusion after reading that book in 3rd grade.

This is where it gets awesome. What would our world look like if you were a two-dimensional creature in a universe flatter than a piece of paper? Us three-dimensional people would appear as 2-D orthographic projections into the surface of their 2-dimensional world.

Now try and imagine the concept that our universe, all of what we consider space-time, is actually curved in the fourth dimension. Picture a soap bubble floating effortlessly in the air. Now imagine that the outer skin of the soap bubble is our entire universe and that universe is curved in the fourth dimension. Every once in a while, the bubbles come close enough where travel between the bubbles might be possible.

These are the concepts that Michio sets forth in his book and many other books. You've probably seen him on Discovery channel or more likely on the Science channel. If you can't recall who he is, he's the only one of the guest scientists who isn't mind-numbingly boring, or so socially inept that they have no business on TV. Quite possibly the single coolest thing that Michio talks about in this book is the notion that things like light and gravity are actually vibrations in the fifth dimension (or the 4th spacial dimension, depending on whether you're counting time at the moment). If you picture a two-dimensional universe that is a flat piece of paper, and flat, 2-d creatures moving along it, if you crinkled up that paper, they would be incapable of seeing the crinkles, but those crinkles would force the 2D creatures in various ways. This is how Michio says light can have the properties it has - forces are actually caused by fifth-dimensional geometry and are not forces like we traditionally think about forces. Mind-blowingly awesome stuff.

The bottom line of his book is that you can in fact construct a unified field theory, the "theory of everything", when you allow "more room" to calculate by exposing 10 dimensions. Light, gravity, and all the rest fall into place with simpler, more unified equations when viewed from the perspective of higher dimensions.

If you are even remotely interested in science or math, and are open to new ideas, then I highly recommend you go get and read this book immediately. Also pick up Parallel Worlds. His newest book, The physics of the impossible, is also pretty good, but it's much lighter weight than the other books and if you watch the science channel or discovery channel, a lot of the content from that book is on there.

tags: hyperspace  ndimensional  michio  kaku  books  4thdimension  

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