Orbitron

Pretend you are watching a teevee show about the solar system. Specifically, you’re viewing a scene of a planet orbiting about the sun from a bird’s-eye view, north looking down.

You can almost switch to thinking you’re watching an electron orbit a nucleus. But, no, let’s keep it to a planetary orbit. You see a sun on the flatscreen teevee and observe a planet – no bigger than a dot, really, circle around it.

Got the image in your mind?

Good. Let’s proceed.

What we’ve done is transfer a three-dimensional image down to two dimensions. For all intents and purposes, I could ask you to imagine a plain ol’ black dot circling about on a piece of paper.

In fact, let’s do.

Now, how can we explain this motion? This circling around of a dot about a central point.

In three dimensions, you can mention things like gravity or the electromagnetic force. But how would you explain it for this piece of paper?

Maybe an invisible string? One attached to a central point?

Perhaps. But let’s think a little deeper.

To do so, though, we have to cheat a bit, and move back into three dimensions.

Let’s imagine a slinky, one that’s a bit stretched out. Now imagine that piece of paper again, only make it of some immaterial construction, like a laser hologram of some smoky type you might spot Catherine Zeta Jones writhing through. Pass the slinky through this wispy piece of paper and what type of motion will you observe?

That’s right. A dot circling around a central point.

So two-dimensional “orbits” can be explained by moving a three-dimensional slinky – let’s call it a helix – through the two-dimensional plane.

Got it?

Here’s the really neat part. Now we move everything up a dimension.

Go back to that planet orbiting a star scenario, though imagine it as you would observe it from a spaceship. It’s really there. It’s right in front of you.

Could not this three-dimensional motion be explained as a four-dimensional helix passing through our reality?

How COOL is that idea?!?!