THING —> HAPPEN

Here are some things we know (or at least think we do):

Our universe of space and time is something like 13.8 billion years old, and getting older every day.

 

By contrast, average human lifespan is ~70 years.

 

Humanity, our species, is only ~200,000 years old.

 

Life itself, beginning with single celled organisms, is approximately 4 billion years old.

 

In other words, it took over 9 billion years for life on earth to emerge, and another ~3.8 billion years for our species to evolve.

 

Though we have good, albeit circumstantial, evidence of the beginnings of life and the universe, we have no clear idea when—or even if—our universe and even life itself will end, how many more billions of years it will continue to exist.

 

The difference between billions and tens or hundreds or thousands of years is difficult for us to grasp. It's easy to foreshorten these time frames.

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 Our planet, a rocky space object, orbits around a single star.

 

There are hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy.

 

There are likewise estimated to be two trillion galaxies in the universe, each filled with hundreds of billions of stars, many like our own with multiple planets orbiting them.

The universe itself is thought to be some 93 billion light years in diameter.

 

These numbers are so vast, our minds can hardly calculate them.

 

Yet, somehow we are capable of making reasonably accurate estimates of the age and size of the universe and its number of heavenly bodies.

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 At the other end of the scale, atoms and particles inside of atoms—such as electrons, neutrons, and protons—are unfathomably small. The number of them is incalculable. For example, there are billions and billions of atoms in a single grain of sand.

 

Particles are nebulous, cloud-like, that is, until they are observed.

Through our instrumentation and experimentation, we can make some reasonable observations of their probable locations or velocities.

Yet, they exist in the smallest conceivable unit of physical space, something called a Planck length. One way to visualize how small this might be is the following: Imagine "a particle or dot about 0.1 mm in size (the diameter of human hair, which is at or near the smallest the unaided human eye can see) were magnified in size to be as large as the observable universe [i.e., 93 billion light years in diameter], then inside that universe-sized 'dot', the Planck length would be roughly the size of an actual 0.1 mm dot."

 

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The speed of light is 299,792,458 meters per second; or ~186,282 miles per second. We've managed to approximate this as well. A light year, of course, is the distance a beam of light, or a photon, would travel in a year at this rate of acceleration.

 

Our planet is about 25,000 miles around the equator. A photon of light could circle the earth more than 7 times in a second.

 

A photon will travel at this constant rate in a straight line forever until it interacts with another particle, though its path may be diverted by gravitational pull.

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At absolute zero, or zero kelvins, or -273.15 degrees Celsius, or -459.67 Fahrenheit, matter reaches it foundational state.

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The scale of human perspective exists in a state in-between all these phenomena: the instantaneous and the near-eternal, the very, very large and the very, very small, energy and matter, the speed of light and absolute zero.

 

How is it that we are privileged to have this vantage on all these phenomena? How is it that we can make some reasonable guesses about the nature of these things? This is a philosophical question.

 

The human scale is characterized by brevity, uncertainty, relativity, and incompleteness.

 

We have, of course, and have to rely on the evidence of our senses: sight, hearing, smell, touch, and taste.

 

But we also have extensions of many of these—prostheses, if you will—such as: mathematics and logic, atomic microscopes and particle accelerators, x-ray and infrared telescopes and arrays of radio antennas, gravitational wave observatories and electromagnetic spectroscopes, among many others.

 

These provide access, but they also limit us. It is important to understand these limitations.

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Imagine if we were creatures who could at once perceive things that were ~93 billion light years large all the way down to the Planck length.

 

Imagine if we were creatures who experienced the lifespan of a galaxy the same way we humans experienced a single burst of fireworks.

 

Imagine if we were creatures who experienced the entire universe of space and time the way we now experience a wave on the shore, or even as a single bubble of spindrift in the foam of a breaking wave.

 

Imagine if we were creatures who could code a virtual computer program to run on its own in four dimensions according to certain preset logical conditions.

 

Or, imagine if we were creatures made up of pure, unbounded energy (or, alternatively, information) who never experienced entropy or succumbed to the dimensions of space and time, at once both greater than and somehow beneath physical reality.

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Are such imaginary beings or creatures or things possible? Could they exist? Who knows?

And, if so, would it even be correct to call them beings (or creatures or things) or say that they exist?

We may never be able to say, not least because we suffer from the structural limitations of our language (and thus the human mind) which, ultimately, breaks down to following formula: THING —> HAPPEN.

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I suspect the Ancient Greek philosopher/sophist Protagoras was righter than he ever could have imagined when he said: "Man is the measure of all things, of the things that are, that they are, of the things that are not, that they are not."

 

It is at once a statement of great hubris (or vanity) and profound humility.

The Geometry of the Imagination

For you creative types or for those of you who find your imaginations limited, here's a formal exercise* to help you stretch your brain.

Imagine a point. In geometry, a point is merely a location. It has no size or dimension. Let's call it P.

Simple enough. Now, imagine a point moving from one location to another. Two points describe a line that extends through both of them infinitely in two directions; it has length. Call it Line AB. Length is the first dimension.

Add a third point that is not in line with AB, call it C. Or, imagine Line AB moving in a perpendicular direction through Point C. That describes a plane which, like the line extends infinitely in two dimensions: length and width. Call it Plane ABC:

So far so good. Now, imagine a fourth point which does not lie on Plane ABC. Visualize Plane ABC moving as a whole through this point. This fourth point adds the element of depth, describing the third dimension of space.

So far, our little formal exercise has been fairly intuitive. Every school kid understands how this works because, for one thing, our bodies describe a space—as does our expanding universe. Now, however, things become less obvious.

Imagine another point, a fifth point through which this three-dimensional space itself (which, I must remind you, like its subsidiary dimensions is infinite in every direction) moves as a whole. This is difficult to do because we have no way of formally representing this motion.

Let's simplify. The most efficient description, or model, of a finite space (or a solid) is a tetrahedron, a three-sided pyramid. Four points.

Imagine holding a solid tetrahedron in your hand and tossing it in the air and catching it. See it tumbling through space, up and back down. Now, visualize the entire tumbling arc, from toss to catch. This describes an event in time, the fourth dimension.

Of course, we must expand our model as we have each of our other dimensions and recognize that time is infinite and unbounded. And, as with our other dimension defining points, lines, and planes, we recognize (a) that time exists both within and throughout space and (b) that infinite three-dimensional space also moves through eternally extended time—much like our odd-shaped triangular ball above.

Have we stretched our imaginations? Yes. Are our brain muscles feeling sore like our arm muscles after lifting weights or our leg muscles after running? Sure. Dare we dare to imagine more? Let's.

We've imagined a model of infinite space moving through eternally extended time. The first thing we intuit about this space-time model, though, is that time seems to move in only one direction. Forward. Even sitting still, perfectly motionless, we move forward through time (and, technically, space! See my serial post entitled Being v. Becoming under Pages in the right-hand column). We time-travel (the relevant post from my series) at a relative rate towards what we call the future, never backwards toward the past. Why is this? It is for the same reason a point moving from A to B defines only a line, or a moving line describes only a plane, or a moving plane delimits space. As spatial beings, our experience of time is dimensionally limited. We exist in space-time and our perceptions are limited by its geometry.

But (and the "but" is always the engine of the imagination, isn't it) can we imagine what might exist outside of time? Can we conceive of a fifth dimension? A further point that we cannot intuit, one beyond space, time, and space-time, but through which infinite space and eternally extended time might move as whole?

Let's go back to our model: the tossed and tumbling tetrahedron. We've watched as it grew from a mere point through the dimensions to a line to a plane to a space. Now we've seen its arc from beginning to end describe an event in time. We've noticed that this event only happens in a forward sequence from toss to catch. (And we recall that it is at once happening in space-time and, for our purposes, is a finite model of infinite space moving through infinite time.) If we press a bit and let our imaginations run, we can theorize what a dimension beyond this event might have to be like. This would be a dimension where the toss has not yet happened and yet it has already happened and, what's more, that it is always already happening—forward and backward.

Just as a point dissolves into a line, and a line into a plane, etc., time dissolves into an eternal now (to borrow a phrase [but not a concept] from 20th Century theologian Paul Tillich). As we've noted, there is an infinite length of time: as space expands infinitely, time extends eternally. But this is different from an eternal now in which this infinite extension has already happened.

In this fifth dimension, space does not exist, yet it is infinite and everywhere. Time has not yet begun, yet it extends eternally, and is always already happening—forward and backward.

Now, to try to keep our feet on the ground, we must ask whether such a fifth dimension exists, or is it only something we've imagined? Well, if it's something we can only imagine, then our exercise has been successful! We've expanded our minds, and opened new dimensions of thought.

The question whether there is some sort of fifth dimension beyond time and space and space-time is probably not one we can answer. We must leave it to our imaginations. Though it is fair to say that such a dimension is a possible inference from the geometric argument of dimensional expansion. (As are further dimensions in which eternities themselves dissolve.)

It could be, however, that we're asking the wrong question. Existence might be something that can happen only within the limits of the space-time dimensions. It is not a relevant category of the eternal now. It obtains only where there are limited durations of concrete spaces. It pertains only to realms where what we know as dimensions happen. Existence itself only exists where there is, in fact, geometry.

Imagine that!

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*  FN. I was fortunate in college to attend a master class in creative writing conducted by Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs at my university (UNC-Chapel Hill). Mr. Ginsberg led off the session with a meditation encouraging us to breathe deeply and while doing so ply our imaginations in a similar manner as described above.