Why Can't We Stop at the 5th Dimension?

Two weeks ago I told you about student Jim Evins, who gave me a list of questions for a school paper he's writing about my "new way of thinking about time and space". Here's his second question:

"The 7th dimension dictates all the possible beginnings and ends of our universe, but why would this characteristic not fall under the 5th dimension, seeing as the 5th dimensions explores all possibilities of our current reality?"

...and here's my reply:

In one sense, we've already covered this in my previous response. Or try thinking of it this way: Einstein accepted that our observed reality is derived from the fifth dimension way back in 1921, yet this is rarely taught in schools. Quantum mechanics and concepts such as Feynman’s “sum over paths” tell us that there are many causally connected pasts and futures that connect to any particular “now”, and Everett said that these branches are orthogonal to space-time: so this leads me to insist that you or I are moving points within a fifth-dimensional probability space. Right now, there is zero probability that you and I can suddenly be in the universe where it’s 2012 and dinosaurs never became extinct. If I had lost my leg in a car accident as a child, there would be zero probability of me now suddenly being in the universe where that leg is still fine. But those other versions of our universe, according to the Schrodinger wave equation and Everett’s Theory of the Universal Wave Function, must exist. We just can’t get there from here because Einstein was right: our reality is being derived from the fifth dimension, and not the sixth.

There is one very unique case in which your question does apply, what if one of the two points we’re drawing a line from is the beginning (most commonly called the big bang) of our universe? In the fourth dimension, we can only perceive one causally connected line that gets you from that beginning, that passes through “now”, and gets you to the end of the universe. If the hard determinists were correct, and everything about our universe is inevitable and free will is an illusion, this would be the end of the discussion. Still, we’ve already established that our reality comes from the fifth dimension, not the fourth, so if the first point we define in the fifth dimension is the beginning of our universe, then within this 5D probability space there are all the causally connected 4D lines that get you to any other version, or the phase space of our universe, but it’s important to realize that most of those lines would not pass through the unique “now” that you or I are currently observing because there are so many different possible world lines. Most important of all, once you travel on any one of those lines you are immediately beginning to pare away the possible causally connected paths. In other words, by saying “then this happened” you are obviously excluding all the other possible outcomes that are not logically compatible with the “then this happened” you have just described. The only way to have the complete freedom to navigate within our unique universe’s phase space is within the sixth dimension, and the only way to think of that phase space as a single point is to perceive it within the seventh dimension and above.

Thanks Jim for the great questions. We'll finish these up next week with an entry called "Tesseracts and Time Travel".

Enjoy the journey,

Rob

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