Adding Further Dimensions

Physics has always amazed me. Whether it’s somehting as simple as the Newton’s laws of motion or as difficult as Quantum Mechanics, there are always wonders along the way of understanding each one of them. We live in a world that is 3 dimensional. Everything that exists, which we can interact with, has height, width and depth. Our senses are designed and evolved to sense these 3 dimensions. But if we were to add another dimension, would we be able to sense it? I would say, we don’t have the tools or rather organs developed to do that, which means we can’t even perceive any such thing.

It’s an interesting thought that reminds me of a youtube video where they gave weird but wonderful examples for explaining about perceiving dimensions. Let me try to personify the characters and give you a better layman version.

So, imagine there is a being that exists in 1-D, which means it has only one attribute out of three ( height, width and depth). Let’s name this guy, Dimo. In our perception, Dimo would look like a line. Dimo doesn’t have any idea about up or down, left or right but knows only forward and backward. Now let’s imagine another creature that exists in 2-D, and call him Bidimo. To us, it would appear as a 2-D shape, which can be a circle, rectangle, square, etc. that exhibits only length and width but no depth. Bidimo, like Dimo knows forward/backward but additionally knows left/right too. Then comes the 3-D guy, Tridimo that can exhibit any shape that has all three attributes – height, width and depth. In a way, Tridimo is like us.

Now, if Tridimo happen to see Bidimo at the corner of a cafe, and greets him good morning, Bidimo would freak out. Why? Because, Bidimo knows only forward/backward and left/right. The voice came from someone who has depth too. This is something Bidimo can’t perceive. He would freak out. Same thing would happen to Dimo if anyone of the other two tried to make a conversation with him.

Going back to our understanding of dimensions, we can accurately understand things we interact with in 3 or less than 3 dimensions, but anything that comes beyond that, is simply inexplicable. Imagine, just like Bidimo, if Tridimo hears a greeting from something that exists in 4-D, won’t he freak out too?

Our understanding of the world around us is limited to what we perceive through our five senses. Anything beyond that needs some more developed specialised sense, that we we may not have developed yet. So, if we hear some voices but can perceive who is making them, we would freak out and fear of ‘not knowing’ will set in. For an entity or existence that goes beyond 4-D, which exists on planes we can’t even imagine, it would be difficult for us to picture it’s true form unless we develop a sense of perception that can help us understand, sense and even interact with it.

Call it God, higher power, supreme intelligence, extraterrestrials, or universal life force, in order to understand those, we need to develop a new perception.