Hyperspace

A summary of:
Wertheim, M. (1999). The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet. Virago Press: London.
Chapter 5 - Hyperspace

This chapter explores the explosion of complexity of the geometric figuring of the cosmos. Scientists now speculate there exist 11 dimensions. (It seems rather silly to stop there, at this point. Why not 429?) It began with the little seed of a thought: What if there were 4 dimensions? Would this unseen dimension hold the key to enlightenment? Surely all we needed now to reach heaven was to learn to see differently (194). According to Wertheim, Ouspensky's hyperspace "promised 'higher emotion,' 'higher intellect', even 'mystical wisdom'" (194). Quickly this idea was embraced by artists of the early 20th century, e.g. Malevich, who said of his enigmatic Black Square, it was "a desperate attempt to free art from the ballast of materiality" (196). Why be constrained by the formal rules of linear perspective if, after all, they ultimately mean nothing in the 4th dimension? Unfortunately, we cannot really enter these dimensions; but knowing of their existence confuses the geometry of the world that we can access, and again disorients us. (It seems there is some truth to Kandinsky's statement that "The more frightening the world becomes,... the more art becomes abstract.")

Mathematics itself had some fantastic successes in recent years, performing elegant acrobatics that proved the existence of hyperspace. As Eugene Wigner said famously, mathematics is "unreasonably effective" (219), and indeed it becomes, like the telescope was to Hubble, our only means of glimpsing them at all. The result is that this enshrined mathematics: "The elevation of space as an ontological category is now complete" (211). Wertheim muses: "It is a little-remarked-upon feature of modern Western physics that one way of characterizing the enterprise is by the gradual ascent of space in our existential scheme. The final triumph of this invisible, intangible entity to the ultimate essence of existence is surely one of the more curious features of any world picture" (212). We forever after see our world "refracted through the clarifying prism of geometry" (212).

One of the space implications of these extra dimensions is that they explained forces that we can feel and measure - i.e. gravity, electromagnetism, strong force and weak force (209). And another space implication is the possibility that the very substance of the atoms of our being (a concept difficult to grasp in itself) is composed of space - crumbled, folded space, altering the shape of 3 dimensional reality. "Objects would not be in space, they would be space.... According to this conception of reality, our very existence as material beings would be an illusion, for in the final analysis there would be nothing but 'structured nothingness'" (211). And further,

...time is no longer an attribute of subjective human experience. Thus not only are the atoms of our bodies stripped of independent status and reduced to spatial origami, our most fundamental experience of time as something lived and personal is annihilated. In the eleven-dimensional manifold of various 'theories of everything,' our very being disappears into 'structured nothingness.' We are dissolved in space (215).

Together, this means, "Homogenization has won the day" (214); or in other words, "our world picture is reduced fully and finally to a seamless monism" (215). There seems to be some recognition from Hawking and others that this mathematical explanation, while it works, is not particularly soul-satisfying. They, like Newton, are engaged now in a rebranding battle that ultimately seems doomed to the same failed fate: "the way forward is not to try to divinize physicists' latest conceptions of space, but rather to understand their picture as just one part of the whole" (216). In other words, it's the truth, but not the whole truth; and we should not be so mesmerized by its ability to accurately predict our world that we are blinkered to other forms of interpreting our reality. As Wertheim says, "What I challenge then is not the science, but rather the totalizing interpretation of what this science means" (216).

This is my sticking point as well, as hinted at earlier. Are there not other equally good ways of understanding reality? I have great affection for artist/mystic/etc. William Blake who stubbornly said that he didn't care whether people said the earth was round, because to him it was flat. That is how he could make sense of his experiences. The message here is not that we should arbitrarily accept or reject what we understand to be truth; but it does imply that there are ways in which mathematical truths are less valuable in human terms than other more poetical or metaphorical truths may be. And again, why are we so keen on denying the value of these alternative truths? After all, "reality is not totally reducible to the laws of physics. Love, hate, fear, jealousy, delight and rage - none of these can be accounted for by hyperspace equations" (218).

Wertheim suggests we need humility in our mathematical quest, and recognize, as artists have recognized the limitations of linear perspective, that math only represents one picture of the world (218). We need not always stand in front of this picture; and when standing in front of it, we need not stand on the spot the physicists would choose us to view from.

Wertheim delights in the prospect of cyberspace necessitating this humility, as it is the space that is emerging "that stands quite outside their equations" (219). What seems clear now having read this chapter, is that the Internet is poised to usher in the paradigm shift I was longing for in earlier posts. The frustration, however, as far as I see it now, is that cyberspace is like a prisoner which has not realized that the cage door has been left unlocked. It has not yet woken up to its potential to jump tracks and begin down an entirely new path.