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Description
I re-drew Quasar; this time she is in deep thought trying visualize higher dimensions. This will be extra difficult due to the fact that she is only 2D. Length, width, depth, duration, probability?…. whats next?
They weren’t dumber, true, but their culture was wildly different. Society and education cause culture and culture causes them in an interplay of the two, and ultimately it’s that that separates us - and that our big societies are stable, relaxed and mind-bogglingly huge, complex, and sophisticated enough and we care more about economic prosperity than national conquest.
What I meant to illustrate isn’t that they were stupid (though more murderous, perhaps a bit, since death was a more constant and present companion, death didn’t always seem so far fetched that people would say “if I die” instead of “when”, like they do in our society), but that we’ve come such a long way that it’s very unfair to compare our society.
>diminishing returns
Hah, okay, when I got less #triggered I realized that might be more what you’re talking about.
Particle physics is kinda that way now, and cosmology (branes and all) has always been that way - or at least, was until we started landing probes and Lunar Landers around the solar system, if you count early astronomy as cosmology.
But other fields are ripe. I linked a video on fusion, AI is making huge strides recently, and materials science is a very lively field. In physics I know one area that’s picking up pace is Emergence. Discoveries in relativity even are rather tantalizing - there’s some speculative poking at real breakthrough ideas there.
And if you believe Bob Lazar at all, then atomic physics might make a out-of-the-blue discovery of monumental proportions in coming decades (he’s an interesting guy - claimed UFOs ran on one of the heavier nuclei we’re just exploring in the Island of Stability, that it decayed into antimatter, and he seemed just knowledgeable enough to raise an eyebrow, so while I’m not placing bets, that’s a fun possibility).
True out of the blue discoveries, though, are impossible to predict, and incremental changes are constant, and ultimately, these are just what I know off the top of my head.
For one, with fusion, desalination becomes way more feasible at huge scales and drinking water is peanuts when you can just use the ocean at fusion prices for desalination.
Electric vehicles become more feasible, especially with continuing advancements to battery tech and materials for even greater battery tech advances.
Only ignorance can make you pessimistic about the future of humanity with regards to technological progress with all the work that’s being done in different areas. I suggest you take a look at Isaac Arthur’s videos (I linked one on Ecumenopolises).
My main concern is cultural and political changes short-circuiting these technological advancements before they can lead humanity to a sustaining and bright future for eons to come.
People need to appreciate and cherish these advancements more if they want to benefit from them. You really
appreciate something when it’s gone, and the quickest way to lose it is to not appreciate it.
>exponential growth
Take a second look at that curve. It hasn’t been exponential for a long time now. It’s flattening out, and most intelligent estimates believe world pop will level off around 9 billion, sadly. Very sadly.
The greater the civilization, the greater heights it can reach. Economics of scale are no joke. You cannot run a modern world on less than a billion people - you certainly wouldn’t be building Large Hadron Colliders at 100 million - and there’s no fundamental limit on how that grows more efficient at larger scales.
But AI population could serve the same function, I suppose, if humans are unwilling to provide the numbers necessary to build us some sweet Orbital Rings or O’Niel Cylinders…
But with high efficiency, Earth can support way, way more than this.
To really mine it dry would be building a Ecumenopolis, though at that level you would have enough industry to start building O’Niel Cylinders out of the planetary material - with just the material already in space in dwarf planets, comets, and asteroids you could support billions, if not trillions more, never mind the absolutely absurd numbers you could support turning planetary material into Cylinders. The video I linked talks about that kind of thing.
>cognitive dissonance
No, we’re just talking past each other about different things. I think it’s best we drop that or take it elsewhere, but I’m not particularly interested in kicking a dead horse.
not saying we shouldn’t study the higgs boson. heck what else are we gonna do with all those house sized cryomagnets? but it’s a lot less likely to give us a novel energy transport system than the lightning that we can see with our naked eyes, raining down from the heavens every day, with no giant cyclotron required.
Just because you think the modern era is as bad as the middle ages doesn’t mean your attitude has to actually be medieval. Now excuse me while we get a mob to go burn a witch because our feudal Lord got mad and burned someone’s crops because we couldn’t offer enough tribute.
Less tongue-in-cheek, we literally owe the modern world to scientific innovation. Nuclear power, GPS, modern materials and even modern computing were all made possible because someone asked at some point, “why is it that when we shine a light on a piece of metal it induces an electric current in this particular way instead of in some other possible way?”, and “why does light always seem to go the same speed?”
Esoteric, pointless questions that “hasn’t led to anything and doesn’t effect anyone’s quality of life” ultimately turned out to be building blocks that led to the modern world as we know it, to which we owe modern computing, materials science - there’s virtually nothing we don’t owe to “pointless” questions like that, that often didn’t pay off for many decades and never even directly - usually only by serving as the initial building blocks that later discoveries would build on even further, but being vital to the progress of science nonetheless.
Heck, even when radio was discovered there was no apparent real application of it for many decades, even though the applications seem so abundantly obvious now. Same can even be said of electricity. Why waste money learning about how you can make metal zap people? That’s a stupid and pointless waste of time, it won’t pull my cart, help me keep track of census data, write to my uncle by mail, or anything useful like that - it won’t even help those artists waste money buying their stupid paints when they could be using that money on feeding the poor instead of paint and canvas! </sarcasm>
And good grief. The planet’s big. Very big. You may think it’s a long walk down the street to the chemist’s but that’s just peanuts to Earth. No, it’s really freaking big. And there’s many times more resources floating around in the solar system to boot, which people are already prospecting for valuable ores. So stripping the planet “dry” is really just a Captain Planet dystopian fantasy.
Have a decent source on the topic.
And it’s because people spend tens of billions of dollars on scientific endeavors that we’re now getting to the point where access to space is getting cheap enough that mining some very valuable metals can pay for the cost of launching the mining drones. It’s ultimately this “consumerism” (aka, private enterprise via SpaceX, Blue Origin, and some public companies like Boeing) that’s making it affordable and viable as a real option, too. So ironically enough it’s this “consumerism” that’s making it possible for us to look elsewhere to mine, if Earth really does run low enough on certain valuable ores that you can turn a profit mining from space instead of from Earth, and it seems with some ores we’ve reached that point - not because we’ve mined it to exhaustion, but because private enterprise has dramatically dropped the prices of access to space.
An example of this being a bit more modern - that is, some things that were new a few decades ago only now paying off - quantum computing is one such example. It’s been known as a possibility for a long time, but only now are we starting to see some application. While the true “quantum computer” as it’s said isn’t available yet, some hybrid sort of designs that utilize quantum computing in some ways are coming about already - I’m afraid all I have to cite for that though is what I overheard in some theory group meetings at my university, but I take that as a rather credible source since those people actually work with supercomputers on a regular basis.
And another example is nuclear fusion - have a good video on why it’s actually a lot closer than ever before, and why it’s for real only 20 years off this time, unlike all the overhyped promises in decades past. Boils down mostly to many significant milestones being actually passed for the first time, computing technology, and incremental advances in the research that require rather extensive knowledge to really understand - but the insider scoop is that it really is just 20 years out now, certainly absolutely no more than 40, and I’ll bet you a thousand bucks on that.
…I’m almost certainly overreacting to something not initially meant to be as scathing towards scientific endeavors as it seems, but whatever, I feel rather strongly about this - so I’ll just leave this here. Don’t you ever belittle scientific achievements like the discovery of the Higgs, endeavors like the LHC, or say there’s little hope for the future. Especially at a time where deep learning is really taking off.
At least don’t use a tone that makes it sound like the LHC was unjustified due to its cost. It’s worth a lot more than a measly 50 billion, which is really just peanuts on the scale of world power’s national budgets, especially when spread out over as much time as it was and by as many different countries as it was.
Edited
considering the lhc has cost over 50 billion dollars so far and hasn’t led to anything other than confirming some dusty theories that don’t affect anyone’s quality of life, my bet is on the brain/computer interface. but it’s still a losing bet. my prediction is that we’ll have virtual worlds that make suffering and death obsolete, in as little as a few centuries after I’m dead and it’s too late to save me.
well, either that or we’ll permanently regress to a feudal society after consumerism strips our planet dry.
I don’t have a very rosy view of the future.
Pop-sci magazines are the only ones who call quantum entanglement “teleportation”, and it’s a major pet peeve of mine that they do it. It’s damn dishonest and builds up these false notions that are very damaging for just the reason you describe.
But the higher dimensions of string theory really are higher dimensions, they’re just inaccessible to all known matter except gravitons. But the fact that they exist at all is extremely interesting - it’s not like entanglement where it’s well understood and has been experimentally confirmed to behave the ways that theory predicts - no, the higher dimensions of string theory lie at the frontier of known physics, so who knows what future discoveries may reveal about them?
Of course, given it’s string theory, future discoveries may well reveal that it was all just a funny quirk of mathematics and string theory never ends up successfully making predictions of experimental outcomes.
But future discoveries may also reveal exciting new things about the higher dimensions, perhaps even that you can curve into/through them by curving our familiar 4-spacetime.
And gravity can bleed through the dimensions, which means you can transfer information, which means perhaps someday you could probe those other dimensions or even copy yourself into them like a Star Trek transporter - though whether that’s a continuation of you or just a copy is a whole different discussion :q
But they’re there, and the fact that they’re almost certainly submilimeter means little. There could be a whole universe across them, or even many, all invisible to us (by current engineering and physics) since they’re restricted to their own branes, and we’re restricted to ours.
(funnily enough, my religious belief describes the afterlife as being like this. Perhaps our “souls” are some thing that lies in this other space - but that’s some heavy speculation to say the least)
Heck, almost as speculative - perhaps you could even tap into those branes - say, some brane with a much higher abundance of vacuum energy than ours - and create a source of almost effectively unlimited power.
At the end of the day, nobody really knows because it’s the untested frontier of knowledge. If it’s correct, then there’s a whole other universe lying out there that we’ve never before observed or even known exists, though observation of it would be rather difficult for obvious reasons. But it’d be a hellava discovery if it’s confirmed. At the moment just a very interesting theory.
…But if you’re looking for a portal to Equestria, you’ve got a much better shot with just about any other method - hoping to find utopian aliens in our universe with FTL, building a brain-computer interface and entering a simulation, mental upload, really good VR tech, robotics/animatronics + AI, etc. :q
I don’t know if the rigorous mathematical definition of “spatial” technically includes the 10 in string theory. really I’m just saying that it’s misleading to call them spatial dimensions, because then people think you could potentially travel in that direction, or that there could be things hidden over that way. the dimensions in the theory are so tightly constrained that there’s barely enough room for vibration, so it’d be giving people hope that you knew was going to be taken away.
it’s like how quantum teleportation is just a trick you can do with three quarters and a wad of gum, but the word “teleportation” makes people hope that it’s something more, only to have those hopes crushed when they try to learn about it.
I said all baryonic matter is trapped, but it’s not strictly baryonic matter that is confined to our brane. To be more precise, every particle is, afaik, aside from gravitons.
Gravity is the only force I know of that’s described by a tensor field, and I think that’s related to why it’s not attached to our brane. A better educated physicist probably has the answer to that :q (or just one willing to poke around the internet a little >.> )
And yeah, like many things, they use the math of vibrations, but it is just itself, not our model. I don’t know if the relevant math describes it as anything other than vibrations - in fact I think it’s somewhat explicitly waves in space, otherwise it wouldn’t make sense that their model explicitly requires higher spatial dimensions, which is exactly what it does.
If they weren’t spatial, then it wouldn’t even be worth mentioning, but everything I’ve seen on string theory is quite explicit that it calls for 10 spatial dimensions. The behavior of gravitons and the brane we’re trapped on is exactly the behavior of an object in a space.
I’m not very familiar with the exact nature of the curvature of the higher dimensions enough to state whether it’s all that different from the curvature of the familiar 4d spacetime or not, though.
Edited
I never said that branes and strings weren’t different ways of looking at the same thing. but you might be using the wrong word, since non-baryonic particles include electrons. photons, neutrinos, positrons, and W and Z bosons, all of which have to be tied to the fabric of our universe (have an endpoint on our brane) or their forces would be as oddly weak as gravity.
and what’s truly going on might not be vibration at all, but something in a broad category of things with the same mathematics, of which vibration is only one example. sort of like how the area under a curve may be an integral, but that’s not the only thing integrals can model.
you’re right, I’m not an absolute genius, but I don’t think it takes a genius to see that we’re not gonna be opening portals into the tenth dimension any time soon. and I don’t think any of those geniuses would contest my statement that our regular 3 dimensions are qualitatively different from those theoretical higher dimensions. so I don’t call them “spatial.” “quasispatial” is about as far as I’ll go.
any genius should be smart enough to figure out how to explain it in terms simple enough that an idiot like me could understand, so they’re free to enlighten me any time.
Unless you’ve seriously studied this stuff for years and are an absolute genius, I don’t think you’ll find major revisions to it based off a few minutes of thought.
The reason they’re confined to these three dimensions is because the endpoint of every string is some other n-dimensional brane.
See, it’s kinda a misnomer to call them “branes” and “strings”, really branes are just strings but higher-dimensional ones, and strings are just 1-dimensional branes.
Baryonic matter is all composed of strings that have their endpoints on our brane. Gravity is the exception - I think, iirc, it’s because gravity is described by a tensor field rather than a vector field, or something like that - this has something to do with the formulation of Superstring theory that means that gravity would have to be a string with another 1d string attached rather than our 3d brane, meaning gravity is free to bleed into higher dimensional space, thus it wouldn’t follow the inverse-square law until it “saturates” the higher dimensions, so you could see it bleed into the higher dimensions over short distances.
I don’t know this for sure, but I’m guessing that might actually have something to do with why they thought they might make black holes in the LHC - but the main thing is it’d explain why gravity is so much weaker than the other fundamental forces.
But the theory is very much built on the necessary condition that the strings vibrate through the full 10 dimensions of space, so they’re definitely spatial. The reason the theory has all those dimensions is because the premise is that fundamental particles are vibrating strings, and for that to work (when you go and do the math), they have to vibrate in 10 dimensions of space, hence the 10 dimensions.
Edited
speaking of pedantic, when I talk about a “spatial dimension” I’m referring to an independent vector, wherein every point on it is in a different spot, in a straight line. I’m suggesting that it’s hasty to say “baryonic matter is confined to the brane” when we don’t know anything that isn’t “confined.” my thought is that those 10 dimensions are not spatial dimensions, but a third category of non-spatial dimensions, and the thought experiment of rolling up a spatial dimension is just a clever way to compare apples to oranges. the theories use these “dimensions” to explain how the same spatial location at different times can have different properties, but I think that’s all those dimensions do is determine properties, and cannot be moved through.
so it’s not that our matter is incapable of moving through those dimensions. it’s that those dimensions are incapable of being moved through, because they’re not spatial.
I mean, I’ve never heard of an electron vanishing into higher dimensions. why would baryons alone be confined to 3D?
@Prometheushunter2
the math says if you took 2D planes, you could tie those into knots in 4D. one interesting thing I’ve found about knots though is that thinner ropes make smaller knots, thus an infinitely thin 1D rope would make infinitely small knots. so as you approach infinite thin-ness, knots might technically be impossible in 3D space. you need a rope with a 3D width and breadth in order to make a knot that’s distinguishable from an unknotted length of rope.
What about knots made out of sheets folded around themselves 4-dimensionally. Could you even do that?
Edited
M theory (most modern and best iteration of Superstring Theory) postulates that we don’t physically observe higher dimensions because all baryonic matter is confined to the brane that is our universe - in our case, it’s a 3-dimensional brane in a 10 dimensional space (with the 11th as time).
Though the fact that gravity also falls off with the inverse-square law would indicate the higher dimensions are still curled up, just that they could still be as large as - millimeters, I think? Though I think the LHC has made that way smaller, source I read that from was written before the Higgs was observed.
But anyhoot, knots not untying themselves is just one of many examples. Proteins and such wouldn’t work, either. But even then, there’s a good physical model where the only constraint on the size of the dimensions is the inverse-square behavior of gravity.
It’s pedantic, but you could make a similar argument for large higher dimensions that we can’t move through or observe at all, even with gravity. But then that’d be metaphysics/philosophy, unless you had a good justification for including it in some testable theory.
Though I enjoy metaphysics sometimes, too :q
Edited
Hands you a cube-shaped crumpled-up piece of paper.
@Cirrus Light
to be fair, if there were 4 spatial dimensions, all knots would spontaneously unravel themselves. so any more than 3 have got to be rolled up dimensions, or temporal.
Edited
Dimensions of a system, yes, but when you extend to that more purely mathematical definition the word has strayed so far from its common usage that you should preface it with an explanation that you’re no longer referring to dimensions in physical space, but dimensions in a more abstract mathematical sense, and literally evey variable in a system becomes a “dimension”, and there are many, many variables with no obvious ordering, so it loses most of the advantages of even calling them dimensions in the first place.
Especially when there are some serious theories that actually do refer to a 10-spatial or otherwise higher physical dimensional framework.
But couldn’t probability and and other similar thing be considered diemnsions, not spatial or temporal but dimensions still due the being represents or as coordinates and as a “location”for lack of a better word
Except it’s literally wrong, and this misconception annoys the crap out of me because it’s been so popularized by some pseudoscientist on Youtube spouting out crap he made up like it’s scientific fact.
Here’s the definition of a dimension, and particularly, a spatial dimension, and while time is described as a fourth dimension, it’s important to note it’s a temporal dimension rather than a spatial one.
These aren’t theories about how the universe may be, dimensions are theoretical constructs which may or may not describe the universe at dimensions higher than 4, so it’s not like there’s even any question about it.
Edited
0: point
1: Length
2: width
3: height
4: time
5: possibilities within the same timeline
6: different timelines of the same universe
7: all possible timelines and possibilities of the same universe
8: different starting conditions AKA a different universe, such as different laws of physics, but sharing a commonality
9: different universes not sharing commonalities
10: all universes and there associated timelines and possibilities, EVERYTHING
11. ????
Throughout the dimensions it has the trend of of going from point, line, plane, space, repeat
0. Point 1. Line 2. Plane 3. Space/point 4. Line 5. Plane 6. Space 7. Point 8. Line 9. Plane 10. Space
Now you have a vague impression of how I see the world
Edited
Take every point, copy them, displace them some amount in an arbitrary direction to represent the dimension that does not exist, and connect each copy to its original with a line.
a 2D projection of a 4D hypercube doesn’t look too weird, so what about a 3D projection of a 5D one? we’d be like flatlanders, trying to see inside the 4D->2D projection, going, “it’s some kinda hexagon, right?”
A mess of points and lines at weird angles :p
no idk
I wonder what a 3D projection of a 5D hypercube would look like.
Heh, you know, it’s always kinda funny for me when I realize physicists - these people I (and much of society) put on a pedestal as amazing and dignified, also have individual personality and quirks and stuff like cross-dressing and ponies and whatever else :q
What was your thesis on?
I’ll most likely do something GR related.
I wish I had done that when I did my senior thesis. I’m really interested in GR now along with rockets.