The Case for Fewer Dimensions
nautil.us
nautil.us
This is often brought up in discussions on 4th dimensions but think about it: For the 4th dimensional being to see inside a closed 3D space, photons from that space should reach its visual organs. From the viewpoint of beings in 3D these photons would be "lost". This energy discrepancy should be detectable by placing 3D sensors around that space.
I'm not saying that we are in a simulation. But imagine if we were. A simulation that calculated the state of every cell based on various rules. But these cells are NOT layed out in a grid that somehow maps to reality at all. That gravity and even spacial dimensions are just artifacts of how we interact with all of this. That in no sense does gravity cause anything fundemental to be attracted, it's just that when certain configurations of state interact they cause other effect that we perceive as gravity.
I'm not saying we are in a simulation, just that reality might be so different from what we are looking at that, the effects like gravity and matter and movement and dimensions don't really have any physical meaning at all except as how we perceive the interaction of states.
That abstract math might be the only way to every analyse this, and that at some level gravity and so on are meaningless, we have to find some way to model the abstract system states. And in some way investigating the physics that we perceive is meaningless.
Ok.. Enough. Does this make any sense?
I remember when I was 14, talking quantum physics with my father, I said "what if everything is governed by a set of equations that by their very nature say that it is impossible to know what they are or measure them." -- just some teenager ingenuity that may very well be true.
For fun I like to entertain the idea that after we die an extradimensional "me" removes a Rift-like device from them saying "wow.. What a ride, that felt _real_". Has any philosopher written about this?
What? How is that not completely wrong? Gravity is at its most important on large scales. Or are they just badly describing a (known-to-be-broken) quantum gravity model?
So yes, Gravity is the most important force, but that is a consequence of the existence of positive and negative charges, not of the strength of gravity.
We know that gravity can't be so important on small scales because the universe would fall apart if that would be the case. However, our current theories of physics do tell us that gravity is that important on small scales. So the interesting conclusion is that something must be missing in our current model of quantum physics.
Meh.
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