Alexander vanRossum

This is based on what I understand the multiverse to be.  It may be wrong – this is all theory anyway.

We are all familiar with the first through third dimensions.  These are elementary – the first dimension is simply a point – imagine a one pixel square on your monitor.  It’s hard to see, and kind of not-really-there.  The second dimension is simply something that has a length – say, a line between two points.  When you draw something on a piece of paper – it’s essentially in two dimensions.

Three dimensions, that’s easy to imagine, because we live in it – the third dimension allows us to move within an area of space.  You, the computer you’re reading this on, the desk, couch, chair, whatever you are sitting at, these all exist within three dimensions – when you walk or move, that is within three dimensions.  The fourth dimension, however, is where things get a little complicated.  Your life is in the fourth dimension, and is represented by a line that follows you from birth to death, kind of like a blurry smear through time.  Imagine that you have someone cataloguing you with a camera that captures your position in three diminutional space every minute of your life, and they then put that frozen you statue up behind you after they’ve taken the shot.  You’d end up with a very crowded life, for sure, as there would be all these statues – probably quite creepy – piled up behind you, but you could get a look at the path your life has travelled in the past.  When we look at photos from the past and catalogue them in a memory journal, we are building such a line in time.  To complete the image, though, that same person stalking you would have to be able to go into the future and plot all the statues that are going to exist for you on your current path.  Now, to make things more complicated, they have to do this all at the same time, so instantly, your life is laid out both before you and behind you.  Imagine that you are, at this point, hopping from the last statue to the next along this path.  That’s the fourth dimension – a line in time, from beginning to end.

We can extend our own lines, before our birth and after our death, because the atomic matter that makes each of us up both came from somewhere, and goes somewhere – it never ends.  Your mother and father produced you, those cells are matter, your mother ate food which helped you grow in utero, and after your death, the worms will munch on you in your grave, making your matter continue on the path of lives.  Somewhere in you you probably have an atom that came from Lincoln or something.

But that’s neither here no there.

When you think in the fourth dimension, it’s like casting your mind forward to a known point in time.  If you have an itch, and you scratch it, but before you scratch it, you know that you are going to feel relieved, you have thought forward along the fourth dimension.  If you jump off of a 15 story building, but before you do so, you imagine yourself smashing into the concrete below, you have identified the last point on your living fourth dimension.

Now, let’s jump to the fifth dimension.  Fun right?

In the fifth dimension, we have all of the possible outcomes of every action that could be made in the fourth.  We humans think in the fifth dimension all the time, when we weigh consequences of our actions.  Lets go back to the rooftop, and assuming you aren’t in a drunken state of mind, you decide to stop and think about what you are doing.  Instead of just imagining the fall and subsequent splat that comes afterward, you decide to imagine the other possibilities that are available to you.  You could jump off of the rooftop, and go splat.  We’ll call that possibility 1.  Let’s say that the second possibility is that you grab a bedsheet to make a crude parachute before you jump – still likely to result in a splat, just a less messy one.  The third possibility is that you could turn around and face whatever is chasing you to this precipitous point in time – say… the cops.  This will result in you probably going to jail.  Fourth possibility is that you could maybe hide behind something on the roof and hope that no-one finds you.  You’ve just imagined in the fifth dimension, however, since we are only third dimensional beings, we can only take one of those possible outcomes to fruition.  The fifth dimension is where all the other possibilities happen.

Now, let’s imagine Mr. Creepy Stalker with the three dimensional camera comes along, and he takes pictures of not only the current timeline of whatever you decide – whether it be splat or jail – but all the other possibilities as well, thus making them a reality – all of them are happening.  Now, imagine that he has done this for every possible situation in every decision and movement of your entire life.  Not only would you have a very good grounds for a very awesome lawsuit, but he would have catalogued the sixth dimension of your life – every possibility of every event of every second of your life – all happening at the same point – notice point, not time – we’ve graduated past time here.

Damn.

Read the second article on this topic here.