Physicists claim to have observed subatomic particles (neutrinos), which behave as if they travel “backwards” through time. What can this possibly mean? Are we like passengers playing bridge in a train hurtling through the night past another train going in the opposite direction? Why only backwards? Might we be passing over a bridge with another train underneath us, moving in a direction orthogonal to ours? Might there be a bridge game going on in that other train as well?
With that humbling thought, consider us to be inhabiting a moment — a moment of infinite dimensionality — not merely three dimensional nor even four dimensional (with time as the fourth dimension, but a moment, each moment each timeless, universal moment consisting of energy patterns in infinitely varied forms.
Physical scientists use mathematical expressions to help them describe the world more precisely than can be done using a natural language like english. (This allows them to explain things they don’t understand.)
They describe the state of an entity in terms of vectors — arrays of data describing the position in space and energy state of particles, their mass, whether they are in motion relative to one another or some fixed point and if so, in which direction they are moving.
As a practical matter, it is impossible to completely define the state of an entity, but imagine that you could completely describe, for every molecule in a cup of water, for every atom, for every electron, for every meson, gluon and quark, exactly what it was, where it was, and where it was going.
If you could, you would have a vector — where each element describes a particle composing the glass of water. Each element would itself be a vector, in turn describing a different feature of the fundamental particle. Such a vector of vectors is called a “tensor.”
This would be one big, honking complex tensor!
But wait, another interpretation of a tensor is as a multidimensional space, where each element of the tensor represents a dimension, and each dimension is characterized by the corresponding value or subvector.
If i had a room with six lightning bugs in it, i might have a vector of six elements. Each element would itself be a vector of three elements, specifying the position of each bug at any instant in time.
You could think of such a descritption — a tensor field — as either a three-dimensional field of six elements or a six-dimensional field of three elements. Mathematically, they are equivalent.
It is only at the conceptual level that we humans have a problem interpreting a six-dimensional entity. This is a limitation of our wiring — our brains — not of the world itself.
In other words, merely because we cannot intuitively grasp a concept does not mean that it fails to accurately describe the world.
Too often we all fail to preceive the reality around us because it does not “make sense” to us. It does not match our internal representation of the way things are, or the way we think things should be. But when we do this, we are making a mistake. The way things are does not have to match our preconceived notions!
Our internal models fail to describe the actuality. It is ok. We are like aristotelian scholasitcs of the medieval period — our flat earth at the center of our tiny imagined universe does not begin to describe the world we actually live in, and yet, the earth still spins, even though we doubt her. The idea is to become aware of that fact, and admit that you have no idea what is going on. Don’t go on trying to fit the round peg of the universe into the square hole of your preconceived notions. Nothing good will come of it.
So. If we could so describe a glass of water perfectly accurately using a very large tensor field, imagine the dimensionality of the glass as the number of elements in the tensor. The number of particles we can so describe. This is a rather large number, perhaps on the order of 10^15
That is the dimensionality of a glass of water.
Now imagine describing the entire universe this way. How big a tensor would we need? How many dimensions are required merely to describe the portion of the universe we know about? How much more remains unknown to us?
See what I mean about humbling?
And yet, imagine if we could define such a tensor field and so completely define a moment. How many different moments have there been, or will there yet be? How many moments might there yet be, which will never come to pass? How many others might there have been, which to us, never were?
Our normal conscious mode of thought is very good for establishing cause and effect rationales, and has so far been an important factor in our continued survival. So far, I say.
We can only focus on one thing at a time, and yet, we can sometimes intuitively grasp it all in an instant, in one moment. One moment of time. Time. What is it?