Higher Dimension

Wanna neat way to think about higher dimensions?

Of course you do.

Try this. Visualize the everyday world around you. That’s three spatial dimensions plus a time dimension, or a four-dimensional continuum physicists and scientifically-oriented folk call spacetime. That’s easy.

Now, imagine different objects have different colors. Let’s keep it simple, and assign, oh, how about the three primary colors, one to each object. For instance, I’m at my dining room table writing this. The table is blue. My laptop is red. The chairs are yellow. The walls are blue. The floor is red. Different shades, but all shades of the same three primary colors.

Got it?

Here’s the nifty part.

Physical interaction between any two objects depends not only on their location in space (as well as time, if you think about it), but also color. Two objects need to be the same color to interact. Thus, my laptop would fall right through the table and crash onto the floor, because the laptop is red and the table is blue. They can’t interact. But the floor is red, also, same color as the laptop, so those two objects can.

For this type of reality to be viable, most if not all objects would need to be shades of a single primary color. The laptop would be pink. The table crimson. The floor rose. The walls, a bright cherry. Me, a dark, full-bodied red. You get the idea. Now extend it further. Might not ghosts, or spirits, or alien beings, or whatever (God, perhaps?) exist in the room right next to you, undetectable to you, simply because they are some shade of blue? Or yellow?

Might this be analogous to the ordinary, humdrum world you see yourself in right now?

Hmmm?


[Idea cannibalized from a short reference I read from a 1927 book by Hans Reichenbach entitled The Philosophy of Space and Time.]