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When one looks in the box, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the cat.

Reactor

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Malebolge

has started a conversation in the community section about

the math involved in FTL (faster than light) travel

. Go check it out. It’s a bit above my head, but fascinating nonetheless. (Spoiler ahead!) He concludes that any FTL activity must involve dimension-hopping. This put me in mind of a post I wrote a while back on my (now defunct) Blogger blog, which I’ll repost here for your amusement (or derision, I’ll take either).

From the promo website for the book, Imagining the Tenth Dimension, by Bob Bryanton, comes this very engrossing Flash video explaining the nature of the ten dimensions (and you thought there were only four. Ha! You’re soooo twentieth century- the future’s all about quantum physics and string theory, baby!). Physicists tell us that the subatomic particles that make up our universe are created within ten spatial dimensions (plus an additional dimension of time) by the vibrations of exquisitely small “superstrings “. The video explains this all relatively simply, in terms that most of us can understand.

Superstring theory is yet another instance in which science fiction has anticipated science. The idea of parallel universes and/or dimensions is an old one, and you don’t even have to be a hard-core SF geek to have been exposed to it: a screening of the Back to the Future movies will suffice for you to get the gist of it. According to the video, it would actually be theoretically possible to travel between parallel dimensions (or alternate realities, if you will). The only caveat is that since we, as humans, are limited to experiencing our reality within the context of the first three and a half dimensions (length, width, depth, and duration/time, but we don’t really see this one as a whole, we simply experience it in a limited way as we travel through it), we don’t even percieve the rest of the ‘higher’ dimensions.

This concept gels nicely with the subject of the book I’m currently reading I was reading at the time, 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, by Daniel Pinchbeck. He postulates that humanity is on the verge of a quantum leap in consciousness, where the paradigm of our very existence will change dramatically to encompass ideas and concepts that until now have been relegated to the realm of the spiritual, arcane, mystical, and psychedelic by mainstream science. He puts forth that there are other dimensions to reality, such as the noosphere, which are out of our range of perception for now, because we are not equipped to perceive them (sort of like how we can’t see light in the infrared spectrum, but in a spiritual, or quantum sense), but that soon, humanity will transcend its current paradigm of existence and evolve into a higher state of being. He sets the date for this singularity-like event at or around 2012, according to (among other markers) the date in the Mayan calendar that corresponds to the ending of the fifth—and current—age of mankind. Hence the title of the book, as Quetzalcoatl is a Mayan deity.

It’s strange that I’m coming across all this related information at the same moment. Chalk one up to synchronicity. Pinchbeck actually addresses this phenomenon, albeit from a very psychedelic and mystical perspective, which I find, as a staunch skeptic, a bit hard to take. I don’t know that I subscribe to his interpretation, but it makes for interesting reading.

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Pablo Defendini

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