Edwin Abbott\'s FLATLAND
Thanks MS,
Perhaps the people of nature A see nature B as condusive with their own, but the inhabitants of nature B can't begin to understand the workings of nature A.
Example: I understand the 2nd dimension, but a stick figure would have a hard time understanding 3d.
While you may not realize it, your example is one of my most favorite examples for demonstrating how coherency is not only a good assumption, but how human perception can lead to the
belief that coherency across dimensions does not exist.
Have you ever heard or, or read, Edwin Abbott's famous tome on dimensionality called
Flatland? It is a scientific examination about how life would appear in a 2-D world, and how a 2-D being would perceive an interaction with a 3-D being or object.
The best example from this story is how a sphere would appear to a denizen of Flatland as it passed through Flatland's 2-D plane. The most astonishing thing to the Flatlander is that, out of what seems like
nowhere a dot appears in his field of view (sounds like a coherency problem, but in reality we can see it is a perception problem). As the sphere passes through Flatland that dot begins to grow into a line from the perspective of our Flatlander. At some time this line reaches its greatest extent, and must be quite frightening to our Flatlander, but then it begins to shrink again. Eventually it again shrinks back to a single point and then vanishes completely!
The importance of this thought experiment to our situation is that it can give us a modicum of hope that coherency exists between the dimensions we live in (and can perceive) and any dimensions beyond our perception. So armed with this knowledge of how a 2-D being would perceive an interaction with a 3-D being, does it make sense to assume discoherency between our realm and the realm beyond ours? I'd have to say this would not be a good assumption, and one would have to ask what evidence it would be based upon.
I like the Flatland analogy so much, that I have developed a similar thought experiment that applies to the speed of sound vs. the speed of light. The intent of this thought experiment is to help us get beyond the
belief that the speed of light is some cosmic, God-enforced speed limit. Rather, it is simply a phase transition that is an artifact of our limited senses. If you align the concept of Flatland with a being whose highest physical sensory response is that of hearing (speed of sound), then the analogy of 3-D space in the Flatland story would align to our situation of having a physical sense that responds to the speed of light.
I won't spell out the entire thought experiment here (unless you really want it), but the upshot of this is that WE SET THE ARROW OF TIME BASED ON OUR HIGHEST FREQUENCY RESPONSE SENSORY APPARATUS. Beings who can only hear will order causality in their world based on the speed of sound. However we, who can see at the speed of light, will have a different order of causality (order of temporal events) than our blind friends.
It is my belief that this thought experiment should be sufficient to convince us not only that Time is merely an artifact of human perception, but also that it is reasonable to assume that the laws of physics retain coherency on the other side of the speed of light, as well as in "higher dimensional realms."
Thoughts?
N/I RMT