Speaker 1: Imagine for just a second a ghost. Okay, you're sitting
in your living room, maybe it's late, you're reading a
book or scrolling through your phone, and the house is
just quiet. Yeah, and suddenly a spectral figure walks straight
through the solid brick wall, right through it. It enters
the room, looks at you with a kind of shimmering
incomplete face, and then just drifts down through the floorboards,
vanishing into the.
Speaker 2: Basement right and your brain, your immediate reaction is that
the rules have been broken.
Speaker 1: My brain screams, supernatural. It's a haunting. It's magic. It's
something that fundamentally, you know, breaks the laws of physics, because.
Speaker 2: In our experience the rules are very very strict. Solid
things do not pass through other solid things.
Speaker 1: It's rule number one.
Speaker 2: It's the fundamental rule of the playground we live in.
We rely on walls to keep the wind out and
the roof to keep the rain off. Solid is solid exactly.
Speaker 1: But here is the terrifying thought experiment we need to
start with today. What if I to you that, to
a being living in a higher dimension, walking through that
wall is as mundane, as boring, and as simple as
you stepping over a line drawn in chalk on the sidewalk.
Speaker 2: It wouldn't be magic to them. It wouldn't even be technology.
It could just be geometry, just the shape of the world.
Speaker 1: And that is where we are going today. We are
peeling back the layer of reality we call home to
realize that physics as we know it might just be
a lie of perspective.
Speaker 2: That's a great way to put it.
Speaker 1: It's local, it's conditional, and quite frankly, it's a trap.
Speaker 2: A trap is the perfect word for it. We tend
to think of our three dimensions length with height as
the whole stage, but the math suggests we're actually just
trapped in a very thin, very cramped slice of a
much larger, much stranger auditorium.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Thrilling Threads. I'm your host, and today we
are unraveling the fabric of reality itself. Usually, when we
talk about space in the universe, it's full of wonder right.
Speaker 2: Right, Nebula's galaxies, explorations and potential.
Speaker 1: Today we are talking about the horror of geometry. We're
looking at why higher dimensions aren't just more room for activities,
but actually contain terrifying consequences that dismantle everything We think
is private and safe.
Speaker 2: It's a heavy topic, and we're drawing heavily today from
a brilliant analysis by Aperture. Their mission in this specific
breakdown was really to make us question the stability of
our reality.
Speaker 1: They weren't just trying to teach math.
Speaker 2: No, not at all. They wanted to explore the uncomfortable
implications of what happens when you leave the third dimension.
Speaker 1: And uncomfortable as an understatement. I was reading through the
source material and there were moments where I genuinely felt
a little exposed. It's paused, like instinctively covering my chest
because I felt watched. It sounds crazy, but the logic,
once you follow it is inescapable.
Speaker 2: That's the natural reaction. We are evolved to feel safe
in three dimensions. Our brains are hardwired to trust walls.
When you start looking at the of what lies beyond,
you realize that safety is an illusion. We are essentially
goldfish in a bowl, convinced that the glass is the
edge of the universe while someone watches us from the
living room.
Speaker 1: So let's unpack this, because to understand the scary stuff,
the forty ghosts and the ten dimensional collapse, we have
to start small. We have to we have to understand
why we are trapped. We need to look at the
lower dimensions.
Speaker 2: Right, We need to look down before we can look up.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about the first dimension, the line. This is
as basic as it gets.
Speaker 2: The line a one dimensional world. Imagine a universe that
is just an infinitely thin wire. Okay, if you lived there,
you wouldn't have a body, as we understand it. You
would be a point or maybe a line segment. You
have length, but that is it, no width, no depth.
Speaker 1: So I can move forward and I can move backward
along the wire. That's my whole universe of option.
Speaker 2: That is the entirety of your existence. You can never
turn around because to turn around you'd need a second
dimension to swing your body through.
Speaker 1: Ah.
Speaker 2: You are essentially a bead on a string.
Speaker 1: That sounds incredibly claustrophobic. If I meet someone on the line,
I can't I can't walk around them.
Speaker 2: Never. If you meet another one D being, you are
stuck facing them forever or until one of you decides
to move back.
Speaker 1: So social interactions are very intense, very intense.
Speaker 2: But think about how easy it is to be trapped there.
If I want to imprison a one dimensional creature. I
don't need a complex cell with bars and a toilet.
I don't need a guard.
Speaker 1: What do you need?
Speaker 2: Two points? I put one dot on the line in
front of you and one dot behind.
Speaker 1: You, and that's it. I'm in jail.
Speaker 2: That's it. You are trapped for eternity. You cannot go
around the dot because around implies with which doesn't.
Speaker 1: Exist, and I can't go over it.
Speaker 2: You cannot go over the dot because up doesn't exist.
You are sandwiched between two points, and your life is
effectively over.
Speaker 1: Okay, so that's one D prison, simple brutal. You are
defeated by two specks of dust. Now let's graduate to
the second dimension, the plane, the classic flatland scenario. We
have length and width. Now, squares, circles.
Speaker 2: Triangles exactly. Now, concepts like beside and around start to exist.
So let's go back to our prisoner. Okay, if I
tried to trap a two D creature, let's call him
square with those same two dots I used on the
one D guy.
Speaker 1: You just laugh at you, He would laugh.
Speaker 2: He just sidesteps them, right. He moves into the second dimension,
the y axis bypasses the dots and he's free. So
the prison of the lower dimension is completely trivial to
the higher dimension. It's not a wall. It's a joke.
Speaker 1: But here is where the aperture analysis started to freak
me out, because usually when we learn this in school,
we stop there. We say, oh cool, math allows you to.
Speaker 2: Step around dots, right, A neat little brain teaser.
Speaker 1: But let's look at the perspective of a three D viewer.
That's us looking down at a two D world. Imagine
we have a sheet of paper with a two D
square living on it.
Speaker 2: This is where the horror of perspective kicks in.
Speaker 1: If I'm looking at a two D square on a
piece of paper, I see the whole. I see its edges,
but I also see its center.
Speaker 2: Correct, and that is a profound observation.
Speaker 1: But the square doesn't see its own center. It can't,
can it.
Speaker 2: No, And this is hard for us to visualize. So
stick with me. In a two D world, everything is
defined by its outline. If you are a square meeting
a circle, you only see the line of their edge,
your eye to eye with their perimeter.
Speaker 1: You never see their insides.
Speaker 2: Never to a t D creature, their internal organs, their heart,
their mechanisms. Those are hidden behind their skin, behind their perimeter.
Speaker 1: So if I'm a square, I feel private my thoughts,
my digestion, my heart, it's all safely tuck away inside
my lines.
Speaker 2: They feel safe behind their skin. But you, the three
D observer hovering.
Speaker 1: Above the paper, I see everything.
Speaker 2: You see everything simultaneously. You see their heart beating, you
see what they had for lunch, digesting in their stomach.
You see the blood pumping through their veins. You see
it all without having to cut them open.
Speaker 1: Their insides are totally exposed to.
Speaker 2: Me because to a three D being, inside and outside
of a two D shape are not protected categories. They
are open territory.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, we.
Speaker 2: Can see every secret they possess without even trying. Privacy
is purely a dimensional constraint.
Speaker 1: That feels voyeuristic, but it gets worse. This leads to
that divine intervention concept the source material mentioned the surgery analogy. Yes,
this one really stuck with me because it feels like
a horror movie trope.
Speaker 2: It's a perfect illustration of the power dynamic imagine. A
two D creature has a tumor inside its body, a
little black spot, okay, to remove it, A two D
doctor would have to cut through the skin, break the
outline to reach the inside, just like our surgeons have
to cut us open, right.
Speaker 1: They have to breach the hull to get to the cargo.
Speaker 2: But a three D being you or me could reach
down from the third dimension the updirection that the two
D creature can even proceed in destruct and pluck that
tumor right out of their body and.
Speaker 1: Then put the body back.
Speaker 2: We wouldn't even have to move the body. We just
lift the tumor out into the third dimensions.
Speaker 1: So to the two D creature, to.
Speaker 2: The two D creature, we never touched their skin, we
never broke their outline. One second of the tumor is there,
the next second it has simply vanished.
Speaker 1: It would look like a miracle or.
Speaker 2: A glitch in reality to them, it's magic. To us,
it's just reaching into an open drawer. We bypass their
physics entirely.
Speaker 1: And the reverse is true for prisons. If I draw
a square around a two D guy, he's in jail.
The wall is absolute, he cannot get.
Speaker 2: Out, he is completely trapped.
Speaker 1: But I can just reach in, pick him up into
the third dimension and drop him outside.
Speaker 2: The square, and to his jailer's what do they see?
Speaker 1: They see him just disappearing. The wall is still there.
The guards didn't blink. He's just gone.
Speaker 2: He ceased to exist inside the cell and instantly began
existing outside of it. The wall is still perfect.
Speaker 1: We didn't use force. We didn't smash the wall. We
just used a dimension they couldn't see.
Speaker 2: Force isn't needed to invade, You just need a higher dimension.
Speaker 1: Okay, hold that thought, because that is the premise that
is going to make the rest of this conversation absolutely terrifying.
It is we are the gods to the two D people.
We are the all seeing wall ignoring deities, but we
are trapped in the third dimension.
Speaker 2: We are the two D people of the next level up.
Speaker 1: So let's talk about our reality. The third dimension length
with depth. This is where we live. This where volume
and mass.
Speaker 2: Exist, and interestingly enough, as the analysis points out, it's
the first dimension where knots can exist.
Speaker 1: Knots like shoelaces exactly.
Speaker 2: Think about a knot, it's a string looping around itself.
In two D, you can't have a knot because you
can't pass a string over or under itself.
Speaker 1: You just have lines crossing.
Speaker 2: You just have lines crossing to make a knot. You
need that third dimension to loop over.
Speaker 1: Which explains my headphones every time I take them out
of my pocket.
Speaker 2: They are taking full advantage of the third dimension to
ruin your day.
Speaker 1: They really are.
Speaker 2: It's a geometry problem. But even in three D we
are incredibly limited. We feel free, but we are constantly
bumping into walls. We are trapped by gravity, trap by solids.
Speaker 1: The Source material brought up a really funny point about
our futurism. Oh yeah, we always imagine the future is
having flying cars. It's the ultimate, the Jetson's fantasy.
Speaker 2: The ultimate trope. Where is my flying car? It's a
cliche for.
Speaker 1: A reason, But the aperture analysis points out that flying
cars aren't actually that revolutionary. They're kind of a cheat.
Speaker 2: They aren't revolutionary physics. They're just geometry hacks. Think about traffic.
Traffic is a two D.
Speaker 1: Problem, right Cars on a road.
Speaker 2: Cars are stuck on a plane the road. When we
get stuck in traffic, we are trapped by the cars
in front and behind us. It's a one D trap
on a two D surface.
Speaker 1: So a flying car is just doing what the square
did to the dots.
Speaker 2: Precisely, a flying car just uses the third dimension height
to bypass the two D congestion. It's the same logic
as the subway going under the street or the plane
going over the ocean.
Speaker 1: It's not breaking the limits of physics, not at all.
Speaker 2: It's just using the Z axis to avoid the X
and y.
Speaker 1: Axis, basically just stepping over the line.
Speaker 2: It feels futuristic to us because we are ground based animals,
but geometrically it's trivial. We are still trapped in space
and time.
Speaker 1: Speaking of time, this is where things get trippy. The
fourth dimension the big one. Now. Usually when people talk
about the fourth dimension.
Speaker 2: They mean time, right, And we need to clarify this
because time as a dimension is often misunderstood. We tend
to think of time as a river. We flow down it.
Speaker 1: The past is gone, washed away, the future hasn't happened yet.
Speaker 2: You're on the raft of the now.
Speaker 1: But physics views it differently.
Speaker 2: Physics, specifically Einstein's relativity, views time as a coordinate. It's
a location. The aperture analysis uses the library analogy.
Speaker 1: Right, If I tell you meet me at the library,
that's a spatial location three coordinates, right, But if I
don't tell you when the instruction is useless.
Speaker 2: Exactly to exist, you need four coordinates xyz and T longitude, latitude, altitude,
and time meet me at the lab at noon.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 2: Now, if time is just a coordinate, just a mark
on a map that implies something very very unsettling about
you and me.
Speaker 1: The worldline, the worldline.
Speaker 2: If you could step outside of time and look at
our universe from a higher dimension, the gods eye view,
you wouldn't see you as a person moving around a room.
Speaker 1: What would you see.
Speaker 2: You would see a long, solid, snake like tube.
Speaker 1: A tube, I'm a snake.
Speaker 2: Think of it as a smear of existence, a structure
that stretches from the moment of your birth to the
moment of your death. Your baby self is at one
end of the tube, your elderly self is at the other,
and your current self is just a cross section in
the middle.
Speaker 1: So my entire life, every breakfast I've ever eaten, every
mistake I've made, every moment of joy, it's all just
one static object.
Speaker 2: It's already built, It's already there in the block universe theory. Yes,
it is just one static shape frozen in the block
of space time.
Speaker 1: That makes me feel stuck. Yeah, like do I have
a choice in what I do next? Or is the
tube already twisting? Laugh?
Speaker 2: That is the crisis. It challenges the concept of free will.
If your worldline is already drawn, then your future actions
are just as real and fixed as your past actions.
Speaker 1: You aren't becoming anything, you just are. So I'm not
living my life. I'm just traveling along a pre built track.
I'm roller coaster car thinking I'm steering.
Speaker 2: You're a sculpture in time. The sculpture doesn't change, your consciousness,
just slides along it.
Speaker 1: That is existential enough to ruin my afternoon. But let's
pivot because there is another way to look at the
fourth dimension. Right, not as time, but is space the
spatial fourth dimension?
Speaker 2: This is the ghost part right, a fourth spatial dimension,
a direction that is not up, down, left, right, forward,
or back, a direction perpendicular to our entire reality.
Speaker 1: Anna and Katta up in and down out.
Speaker 2: That's one way to name them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, if a being from that dimension looked.
Speaker 2: At us, Now we apply the lesson from the two
D world. Oh no, remember how we could see the
two D creature's internal organs? How we could see the
blood pump.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we were voyeurs.
Speaker 2: Well, turn the camera around. A forty being looking at
you right now doesn't just see your skin. They see
your entire volume, simultaneously.
Speaker 1: My whole volume.
Speaker 2: They see the food digesting in your stomach. They see
the plaque in your arteries. They see the electrical signals
firing in your brain.
Speaker 1: They see my thoughts physically.
Speaker 2: Yes, they see the neural activity. To them, your skin
is not a barrier, just like the circle's perimeter wasn't
a barrier to us. Your inside is just another surface
to them.
Speaker 1: So if I'm standing in a locked bank vault, titanium walls,
time locks, the works, I feel completely safe.
Speaker 2: To a four D being, the vault is just a
flat square on the ground. It's an open box. They
can just reach over the wall of the vault, moving
through the fourth dimension and take.
Speaker 1: You out without opening the door, touching the door.
Speaker 2: Without breaking the lock. It would look like you just
vanished into thin air.
Speaker 1: For the surgery thing. If I have a tumor, same deal.
Speaker 2: A forty doctor could remove your appendix without ever cutting
your skin. Oh, they would reach in from I'm a
direction where your skin doesn't exist, grab the organ and
pull it out into the fourth dimension.
Speaker 1: To me, looking down at my stomach, I just feel
a weird sensation, maybe a tug, and then pop Appendic's.
Speaker 2: Gone and no scar because the skin was never touched.
Speaker 1: That is a violation. It's cool medically, but the idea
that I can be reached into it.
Speaker 2: Feels like a violation because our evolution tells us our
skin is a wall. But to them it's trivial. It's
like poking a finger into a ring.
Speaker 1: And what would they look like to us? If this
four D being decided to visit my living room, would
I see a monster?
Speaker 2: You wouldn't see them, not really. You would see a cross.
Speaker 1: Section like an MRI slice.
Speaker 2: But in real life, let's use an analogy. Imagine dipping
a strawberry into a cup of water. You are the water.
You live on the surface of the water.
Speaker 1: Okay, I'm a two D water bug.
Speaker 2: As the strawberry dips in, what do you see?
Speaker 1: I see a red circle appear where the berry.
Speaker 2: Touches the water, right, A small red circle. Then as
the berry goes deeper, the circle gets bigger, then the
smaller again is it off? Then it vanishes? Okay, now,
imagine a forty being. Let's say a forty sphere, a
hypersphere passes through your three D room roy see, you'd
see a fleshy, solid sphere appear out of thin air.
It would float, grow larger, pulse, shrink, and then vanish.
Speaker 1: So it looks like a ghost.
Speaker 2: Precisely, it's not transparent. It's just that you are seeing
a three D slice of a forty object. It looks
like it's morphing and shape shifting, but it's actually a
solid object moving through a dimension you can't perceive.
Speaker 1: That is infinitely worse than a sheet with eye holes
that is visceral. If I saw a cross section of
a four D hand, I might see five floating circles
fingers that merge into one big circle the palm, and
then disappear.
Speaker 2: It would look like organic horror, like something out of
a Cronenberg film. But it's just geometry.
Speaker 1: This actually explains notts too right. The source mentioned that
knots are impossible in forty.
Speaker 2: Yes, remember how we said three D allows knots well.
Forty unallows them. It breaks them, It makes them trivial.
If you have a knotted shoelace, a nightmare in three
D and you lift it into the fourth dimension, the
string can simply pass around itself in that extra direction
as falls apart sides apart. The knot was an illusion
caused by a lack of space. Give it enough room,
give it a fourth dimension, and the constraint vanishes.
Speaker 1: It really makes you wonder how many of our problems
in life, physics problems, engineering problems are just because we
are cramped in three D.
Speaker 2: That's the Klin bottle. You've seen those glass shapes that
look like a bottle twisting into its own neck.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the impossible bottle yesser stuff.
Speaker 2: In three D. It has to intersect itself, the glass
has to pass through the glass. It looks like a glitch,
a paradox, right, But that's because a cliin bottle is
a fort dy object and four D it doesn't intersect.
It loops around in that extra dimension. It has no
inside or outside.
Speaker 1: So when we make a glass model of it.
Speaker 2: We are crushing a forty object into three D space,
where breaking it to make it fit. The paradox isn't
the object. The paradox is our world.
Speaker 1: Care dox is our world. That is a great line,
but we are just getting started. Four D is like
the entry level horror, it really is. Let's go deeper
or higher.
Speaker 2: Let's go to five D, the fifth dimension. This is
where physics starts to unify. This is where the magic happens.
Speaker 1: This involves a guy named Calusa, right back in the
nineteen twenties.
Speaker 2: Theodore Calusa. He was a mathematician, and he did something
incredibly bold for the time.
Speaker 1: What I do.
Speaker 2: He took Einstein's equations of gravity general relativity, which worked
perfectly in four dimensions three space plus one time, and
he just said, what if I write these equations for
five dimensions?
Speaker 1: That's for fun. Let's add a column to the spreadsheet
and see what happens.
Speaker 2: Basically, he added a fifth dimension, a spatial direction he
imagined was curled into a tiny loop at every point
in space, unseeably small. Okay, And when he ran the math,
something spooky happened. The equations split into two parts. Okay,
one part was Einstein's gravity exactly as we know it,
no changes.
Speaker 1: So far, so good.
Speaker 2: But the extra part, the part that came from the
ripples and that tiny fifth dimension. It perfectly matched Maxwell's
equations for electromagnetism.
Speaker 1: Wait, I need to understand this. Yeah, he didn't add
electricity to the math. No, he just added room, and
electricity appears exactly.
Speaker 2: He didn't force it, It just popped out of the geometry.
This suggests that electromagnetism, light, radio waves, magnets might not
be a separate force. It might just be gravity vibrating
in the fifth dimension.
Speaker 1: Light is just a ripple in the fifth dimension. My
Wi Fi signal is a tremor in a direction I
can't see.
Speaker 2: That's the implication of close acline theory. We see light
because we can't see the fifth dimension. We see the
shadow of the vibration.
Speaker 1: That is beautiful. It makes the universe feel so elegant,
so simple, deceptively simple. But then then things get weird
with the spheres again, because apparently dimensions aren't just more room.
Some dimensions are hostile sphere packing.
Speaker 2: This is a great way to measure how roomy or
efficient a dimension is. If you have a box, how
many oranges can you fit in it? Okay, As you
go from one D to two D to three D
up to five D, space gets bigger. You can fit
more volume in In five D. A unit sphere has
the maximum possible volume relative to the space. It is
a peak of efficiency.
Speaker 1: Space is generous.
Speaker 2: It's the Goldilocks zone of dimensions. Everything fits.
Speaker 1: Then you hit the six dimension.
Speaker 2: And the generosity ends in reality shrinks. It's completely counterintuitive.
You add a six dimension more room, but the math
shows that volume starts to shrink. Objects occupy less of
the available space. Distance starts to lose, meaning.
Speaker 1: How can adding room make things smaller? That makes no sense.
Speaker 2: Think of it this way. As you add dimensions, the
corners of a hypercube get further and further away from
the center. The space becomes spiky, the middle empties out.
It becomes inefficient to exist there. This is where string
theory lives.
Speaker 1: String theory needs ten dimensions, right, It usually.
Speaker 2: Acquires ten or eleven, but specifically it uses these six
extra dimensions beyond our four to explain why particles have
mass and charge.
Speaker 1: The Kelabiao shapes I've heard the name, but what are they.
Speaker 2: Imagine a flute. The shape of the flute determines the
sound it makes right the notes you can play.
Speaker 1: Sure.
Speaker 2: In string theory, these extra six dimensions are curled up
into tiny complex knots called calabio manifolds. At every point
in space and the geometry of that knot. The shape
of the flute determines the vibration of the strings.
Speaker 1: Which determines if a particle is an electron or a
quark exactly.
Speaker 2: This implies that the laws of physics, the mass of
an electron, the strength of gravity aren't written in stone
by a creator.
Speaker 1: They are accidental, accidental.
Speaker 2: They're determined by the random shape of the curled up dimensions.
If the dimensions were folded differently, the electron might be heavier,
atoms might not form.
Speaker 1: The universe might be lifeless.
Speaker 2: Right, Physics is just geography. It's just the landscape we
happen to live in.
Speaker 1: Physics is an environmental accident. We just live in a
neighborhood where the calabio shapes happen to allow for carbon
based life.
Speaker 2: That makes me feel incredibly fragile. We are balanced on
a geometric flut.
Speaker 1: It really does. But let's keep climbing. We've gone through
the messy, shrinking sixth and seventh dimensions, and then we
hit the eighth dimension, and suddenly perfection.
Speaker 2: Returns the islands of order. It's such a great term
for it.
Speaker 1: The Source called this the e eight lattice.
Speaker 2: In eight dimensions, you can pack spheres together in a
way that is mind bogglingly perfect. Specifically, exactly two hundred
and forty spheres can touch a central.
Speaker 1: Sphere, not at two thirty nine, not two.
Speaker 2: Forty one, exactly two forty. It is a rigid crystalline
structure of logic. It snaps into place. And this structure
e eight shows up in the most advanced math we have.
It appears in string theory, it appears in error correcting
codes for computers.
Speaker 1: So reality gets messi in sixty and seventy, but then
snaps into a perfect grid in eighty.
Speaker 2: It suggests that dimensionality isn't neutral. Some dimensions amplify chaos
and some amplify order.
Speaker 1: And then there's dimension twenty four.
Speaker 2: The leech lattice.
Speaker 1: The name even sounds cool, like a villain's layer.
Speaker 2: In twenty four dimensions, you hit another peak of perfection.
One sphere can be touched by exactly one hundred ninety
six thousand, five hundred and sixty others.
Speaker 1: That is a very specific number, one hundred ninety six thousand,
five hundred and sixty.
Speaker 2: And it's crucial. This specific geometry isn't just theory, it
is used in the real world. We use the math
of the leech lattice in the Voyager space probes.
Speaker 1: Wait, the probes we sent to deep space in the seventies.
Speaker 2: How yes, when Voyager sends a signal back to Earth,
it's faint. It's full of static and noise from the
vacuum of space.
Speaker 1: Right it's billions of miles away.
Speaker 2: So we use a code based on twenty four dimensional
geometry to figure out which bits of data are real
and which are noise.
Speaker 1: So we're using twenty four dimensional math to repair the
information exactly.
Speaker 2: The structure of twenty forty space is so robust, so redundant,
that it protects information from destruction. It's like the data
has more places to hide from the noise.
Speaker 1: That's almost coetic. Information survives chaos because of twenty four
dimensional geometry.
Speaker 2: It's like the universe has a built in backup drive.
Speaker 1: It makes you wonder if the universe itself uses these
higher dimensions to store the truth where the chaos of
the three D world can't corrupt it. It's a fascinating thought,
but sadly the perfection doesn't last because now we have
to talk about the collapse. What happens when we go
to dimensions nine, ten, and forty two.
Speaker 2: This is where the human mind just breaks. Let's start
with the hypercube problem in nine and ten dimensions.
Speaker 1: The inside is bigger than the outside problem, which sounds
like a tartis but worse.
Speaker 2: It's way worse. If you put a sphere inside a
cube in three D, the sphere is contained. It touches
the walls simple enough, but as you add dimensions, the
corners of the cube get further and further away from
the center, The diagonal gets longer, and by the time
you reach the tenth dimension, the geometry is so distorted
that the sphere has to grow incredibly large just to
touch the faces of the cube. It grows so large
that it actually starts poking out of the cube's corners.
Speaker 1: Wait, the sphere is defined as being inside.
Speaker 2: And yet mathematically parts of the sphere are now outside.
Speaker 1: The cube, so it containment fails.
Speaker 2: The concepts of inside and outside stop making sense. A
boundary no longer bounds, nothing is safe, nothing is solid.
In ten dimensions, you cannot lock anything away.
Speaker 1: That is deeply unsettling. It's like saying a prisoner's too
big for his cell, so he just exists in the
hallway while still being in the cell.
Speaker 2: It's a fundamental breakdown obstruction. Yeah, and then you get
to dimension forty two.
Speaker 1: The sausage catastrophe. I love that name, the sausage catastrophe.
It sounds like a bad picnic, but the math is serious.
Speaker 2: It's a theorem about packing. In three D. If you
want to pack spheres efficiently, you cluster them like a
pyramid of oranges at the grocery store.
Speaker 1: Right, A nice tight cluster, best use of space.
Speaker 2: That holds true for a while. As you go up
in dimensions, clustering is still the best way. But at
dimension forty two the.
Speaker 1: Math breaks breaks.
Speaker 2: How Suddenly the most efficient way to pack spheres is
not a cluster. It's a straight line. The sausage, a long,
infinite line of spheres.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, but you can't just drop that and move on.
Why does a universe with more room force things into
a line? Intuition says, if I have a bigger box,
I can make a bigger pile of oranges.
Speaker 2: That's three D thinking in forty two dimensions, the corners
of the box are so far away from the center
that the volume of the box is mostly in the corners,
not the middle.
Speaker 1: The middle emptis out.
Speaker 2: Center becomes a useless concept. The math proves that to
keep spheres touching, you run out of middle space to
cluster them. The only way to keep them efficient is
to stretch them out into a single, lonely line.
Speaker 1: So the geometry literally pulls communities apart.
Speaker 2: The universe stops rewarding structure and starts demanding monotony. Space
becomes indifferent.
Speaker 1: Intellectually humiliating. That's what the source called it.
Speaker 2: It is It tells us that order doesn't always emerge. Sometimes,
if you give a system too much freedom, too many dimensions,
it collapses into a boring straight line.
Speaker 1: So if we lived in a forty two dimensional universe,
planet wouldn't form atoms Wooden cluster likely not.
Speaker 2: Complexity requires constraint. Without the cramped nature of three D space,
interesting things can't happen. We need the walls to bounce
off of.
Speaker 1: This leads to a massive cosmological theory mentioned in the analysis,
the idea that our universe is a cooled residue.
Speaker 2: This involves MODULEI and axions ghosts of geometry. The theory
suggests that in the split second after the Big Bang,
the universe might have had all these dimensions active. It
was hot, energetic, and.
Speaker 1: Ten dimensional and chaotic, everything poking out of everything else,
the sausage catastrophe everywhere.
Speaker 2: Extremely But then it cooled. The extra dimensions curled up
and hid. The Moduley particles that were vibrations of these
dimensions decayed, and what was left us us, the three
D world. We are the ash leftover after the fire
burned out. We are the stable, boring crusts that formed
when the chaotic ten D universe cooled down.
Speaker 1: So physics as we know it, the laws we trust
are just the settling process.
Speaker 2: Correct, We aren't fundamental, We are stabilized. We are the
version of reality that stopped moving.
Speaker 1: That reframes everything we think we are the main characters.
We might not be, but actually we are just the
leftovers with a slag at the bottom of the furnace.
Speaker 2: And that brings us to the final and perhaps most
existential layer of this thread, the observer.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we've talked about geometry, but now we have to
talk about consciousness because all of this math assumes there's
something there.
Speaker 2: To measure it, and quantum mechanics throws a wrench in everything.
Speaker 1: The classic double slit experiment.
Speaker 2: Exactly, an electron acts like a wave, a spread of
possibilities until you look at it. The moment you observe it,
it becomes a particle. It picks a location.
Speaker 1: Reality responds to knowledge, which is terrifying.
Speaker 2: It implays that dimension isn't just a place, it's a condition.
The universe is waiting for an observer to tell it
what to be.
Speaker 1: And this leads to Wigner's friend. This paradox always melts
my brain.
Speaker 2: It's the ultimate who watches the waters scenario?
Speaker 1: Walk us through it.
Speaker 2: Okay, you have a scientist in a sealed lab. She
measures a particle. The particle collapses to spin up. To her,
the reality is set. It happened.
Speaker 1: Okay, she wrote it down. It's a fact.
Speaker 2: But outside the lab there is a second observer, Wigner.
He hasn't opened the door yet. To him, the scientists
and the particle are still in a state of superposition.
How does that mean they are both spin up and
spin down at the same time. The entire lab, from
his perspective, is a quantum haze.
Speaker 1: So the scientist thinks reality is real, but Wigner thinks
the scientist is just a ghost of probability.
Speaker 2: Until he opens the door. Then he collapses the scientist's
reality into his own.
Speaker 1: But what if there's a third guy outside the building?
Speaker 2: Exactly where does it end? The implication is that reality
is not globally consistent, it is locally coherent. My reality
is real to me, yours is real to you, but
they might not match up until we interact.
Speaker 1: We are living in bubbles of consistent see floating in
a soup of probability.
Speaker 2: And this leads to the many world's interpretation, the idea
that dimensions aren't directions you travel, but branches you inhabit.
Speaker 1: Every choice splits the universe.
Speaker 2: You don't make choices. Every choice happens, and one branch
you turn left, in another you turned right, and both
are equally real.
Speaker 1: And if you look at that from the tenth dimension,
from the top of the tree.
Speaker 2: You see the whole tree. You see all the branches
at once. You see every version of yourself that ever
existed or could exist, all laid out.
Speaker 1: And that static view, that God's I view. It removes
the narrative, that is.
Speaker 2: The indifference of structure. If you see the whole tree.
You don't care about the one leaf struggling in the wind.
Speaker 1: It's just part of the pattern.
Speaker 2: Suffering, effort, drama. Those things rely on the illusion that
this moment is the only moment. If all moments exist
at once, then the drama is gone.
Speaker 1: It's just geometry becoming gives way to being.
Speaker 2: That's the perfect way to phrase it.
Speaker 1: That is cold.
Speaker 2: It is cold, But is it hostile? The source argues,
it's not. It's just indifferent. The universe isn't trying to
scare us with Cuthulhu monsters in the sixth dimension. It
just doesn't care about our story. It cares about the shape.
Speaker 1: So where does that leave us? We started this episode
talking about ghosts walking through walls, and we've ended up
questioning if our free will is just a geometric shape
and if we are just the leftovers of the Big Bang.
Speaker 2: I think there is a strange relief in this insignificant relief.
Speaker 1: Yeah, how is being a three D shadow relieving?
Speaker 2: Think about the anxiety we all feel, that sense that
something is off, that the world is too big, too complex,
that low level hum of dread.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I feel that every Sunday night.
Speaker 2: That anxiety is correct we are leaving in a constrained projection.
We're three D shadows of a ten D object. Of
course it feels weird.
Speaker 1: It's not supposed to feel complete.
Speaker 2: Our intuition evolved to find food and avoid tigers in
three D, it did not evolve to understand the tenth dimension.
Speaker 1: So when I feel overwhelmed by the universe, it's just
because I'm trying to run ten D software on three.
Speaker 2: D hardware precisely. And the fact that we can exist
at all is the miracle.
Speaker 1: The compromise.
Speaker 2: Reality compromises. It hides the extra dimensions, It locks them
away in calibio manifolds. It stabilizes the surfaces, It forces
time to move forward. Why so we can live because
a fully aware ten dimensional universe might be unlivable. If
walls didn't work, if time didn't flow, if you could
see everyone's internal organs, you couldn't function, You couldn't be human.
Speaker 1: So the trap of the third dimension, the prison we
talked about at the beginning.
Speaker 2: It's not a prison. It's a cradle. It's a protective
shell that allows consciousness to experience a story.
Speaker 1: Physics doesn't break at higher dimensions.
Speaker 2: It just let's go it.
Speaker 1: Let's go of the rules.
Speaker 2: We need to reveal the truth we can't handle.
Speaker 1: Wow, okay, that is a lot to process. We've gone
from lines to planes, to flying cars, to sausage catastrophes
to the cradle of reality.
Speaker 2: It's a wild ride through the math.
Speaker 1: And I think that's where we have to leave it,
or my head is actually going to explode into the
fourth dimension. But before we go, I want to leave
you the listener with a question, a direct question, based
on everything we discussed today.
Speaker 2: Let's hear it.
Speaker 1: If your life is just a static, completed geometric shape
in the fourth dimension, if your birth and death are
just two points on a line that already exists, does
your current struggle feel less heavy? Does it relieve you
to know the story is written?
Speaker 2: Or does it make it worse?
Speaker 1: Or does it make your choice feel meaningless? Are you
comforted by the structure or are you terrified by the cage?
Speaker 2: That is the ultimate question, freedom versus fate through the
lens of geometry.
Speaker 1: Leave us a comment, let us know where you stand.
I'm really curious if people find this comforting or nightmarish.
Speaker 2: I'm guessing a bit of both.
Speaker 1: Probably all right, check your dimensions. Make sure your internal
organs are still on the inside, and we will see
you next time on thrilling threads.
Speaker 2: Stay safe in three D