by James P. Eldrich

Created on: March 05, 2010

            Throughout my life, two lessons about humanity have stuck out to me more than any others: people are great at being miserable, and something about us deep down loves it. We rush through life with hardly time to smile, and even uttering a simple “thank you” may be too much of an inconvenience for some. Because this annoys me, I have decided to seek out ways I can use my knowledge to better the world. So here goes my attempt at using quantum mechanics and higher dimensions to make you a happier person.

            If you were to take a filmstrip of pictures of space, a movie from start to end, you would have the fourth dimension. If we lived in four dimensions, our destinies have and will always be, set in stone. There is no opportunity for us to alter what happens in our lives. The atoms in our brain simply go where physics tells them to, and the universe falls into line. Fortunately for us, however, physics does not necessarily tell these atoms where to go. In quantum mechanics, there is an idea that before we observe something, a particle exists in many places at once, and it takes on no definitive position until we observe it, at which point it ceases to exist elsewhere through a process known as “wave function collapse”

            One possible meaning for this is seen in the “many-worlds” interpretation, that says when a quantum mechanical event is observed, the universe splits in two (or more than two depending on how many alternate realizations could play out), and those different realities begin to play out in parallel universes. What I take this to be, however, is the fifth dimension. When people make any sort of quantum mechanical observation (e.g. “realizing” which neurons initiate brain pulses) they move themselves onto a different filmstrip of the universe, that exists in a state running parallel to the first.

            When I say parallel, I mean that at the end of our universe, the universe begins to repeat itself, with minor differences dictated by our quantum realizations. Now it is easy to think that a parallel universe would have to influence ours fairly significantly, but if our current frame of our current movie is just a point in an infinite lattice of these points,

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>