Hiding in the Mirror: The Quest for Alternate Realities, from Plato to String Theory
(by way of Alice in Wonderland, Einstein, and The Twilight Zone)
Author:
Lawrence M. Krauss
Excerpts from Chapter One of this lovely book...
I
call our world Flatland, not because we call it so, but to make its nature
clearer to you, my happy readers, who are privileged to live in Space.
So begins perhaps the most famous mathematical romance ever written.
Penned in 1884, under the pseudonym “A.
Square” by the Shakespearean scholar Edwin A. Abbott, Flatland was a poignant tale told by a wistful two-dimensional
being who had just discovered the miraculous existence of three-dimensional
space and longed to enjoy it.
The unhappy hero of this saga urged us
lucky Spacelanders to recognize the beauty of the higher-dimensional universes
that he thus envisaged.
At around the same time that Abbott was
writing Flatland, a lonely and tragic artist on the Continent was imagining
another universe beyond the realm of our perception.
Vincent
Van Gogh was a tortured genius who is said to have sold
but a single painting in his lifetime.
Yet you cannot walk the streets of
Amsterdam today without seeing reproductions in storefront windows of his haunting
self-portraits or his landscapes with yellow skies and blue earth.
In 1882, he wrote to his brother, who was
his sole supporter, “I know for certain
that I have a feeling for color, and shall acquire more and more.”
Through his paintings Van Gogh freed our
minds from the “tyranny” of color, daring us to imagine everyday objects in a
completely different way, and thereby demonstrating that exotic realities could
be discovered in even the otherwise most ordinary things.
His paintings are haunting not because
they are so bizarre but because they are just bizarre enough to capture the
essence of reality while at the same time forcing us to reexamine what exactly
reality is.
These
are the luxuries of art and literature: to create imaginary worlds that cause us to reconsider our place within
our own world.
Science has comparable impact. It, too,
unveils different sorts of hidden worlds, but
ones that we hope might also actually exist and, most importantly, can be
measured.
Nevertheless, the net result is the same:
In the end we gain new insights into our
own standing in the universe.
All of these creative human activities
reflect the essence of human imagination, the spark that raises our existence
from the mundane to the extraordinary.
If we couldn’t imagine the world as it
might be, it is possible that the world of our experience would become
intolerable.
Such imagination almost defines what it
means to be human. Fourteen thousand years ago, in what is now France, a remote
Ice Age ancestor took a walk with a young child into what many of us today
would think of as a dark and forbidding place.
Deep in an underground cave the adult
held the child’s hand against a wall and blew pigment over it, leaving a
shadowlike imprint of a tiny hand that remains to this very day.
We will never know the purpose of this
adventure. Did it have some deep spiritual significance, or was it simply play?
It certainly was not an everyday
activity, as our Cro-Magnon ancestors did not tend to live in the deep recesses
of caves such as this.
Whatever its purpose, it represents
something very special about humans that clearly differentiates us from our
closest relatives on the evolutionary tree.
I am not speaking here about art per se.
Rather, I am addressing the deeper,
symbolic sense of self that art reflects.
The notion that the imprint on a wall
might permanently record the presence of two individuals in the cave that day
implies not only a recognition of their own existence, but also their desire to
preserve some aspect of it against the vicissitudes of a dangerous world.
For with a sense of self comes a sense of
everything that isn’t self, or the “unknown possibilities of existence,” as the
godlike alien Q on Star Trek once described it.
That even earlier humans pondered such
unknown possibilities is testified to by the existence of artistic renderings
that predate the French cave art by at least eighteen thousand years.
In a cave at a site called
Hohlenstein-Stadel, in what is now Germany, a foot-tall figure of a standing
human was discovered. No less striking than the skill of the artist who created
it is the subject matter: This figure has the head of a lion, not a man.
Did this early carving represent some
primal notion of a deity?
Or did it merely represent the
recognition that if lions existed, and humans existed, then somewhere, some
exotic combination of the two might exist?
Of course, here again we shall probably
never know what motivated our ancestral carver, but whatever its purpose the
figure reflects an artistic imagining of the possibilities inherent either in
this world or in one beyond it.
In the three hundred centuries that have
passed since this figure was created, human civilization, and human
imagination, have evolved considerably.
But there remains a fundamental
connection between our modern efforts and these first, tentative steps:
When
we imagine the world beyond our experience, we are digging deep into our own
psyches.
One such notion is: the longstanding love affair of the human intellect with the idea that
there is far more “out there” than meets the eye.
Science has, of course, validated this
notion.
Whole new realms of the physical world
have been exposed by the spectacular scientific developments of the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries.
But in the present context I mean
something more literally “out there.”
Could space itself extend beyond the
bounds of our experience, and can there be whole new dimensions of space just
out of reach of our senses?
It is difficult to disagree with Serling
that imagination adds an extra dimension to the human experience. Still, the
question remains:
Is a fifth—or even an eleventh, or
twenty-sixth—dimension purely imaginary?
What if extra dimensions exist but they
remain hidden from even the most sophisticated detectors?
Can our imaginations alone enable us to
pierce nature’s veil to discover them?
This very question drove the most famous
of all philosophers in Western history to write a tale about a two-dimensional world
as an allegory for our own limited understanding of reality.
Twenty-five hundred years ago, in his
most famous set of Dialogues, The
Republic, Plato invented the allegory of a cave to describe his belief
in the possibility of uncovering hidden realities within all of the objects of
our experience.
Plato envisaged our lives as being like
those of individuals confined in shackles within a cave, unable to directly see
the world of light beyond. These prisoners viewed all objects located outside
the mouth of the cave via the shadows they cast on the cave’s back wall. To the
viewers, who had no other experience, the shadows themselves represented the
real objects.
Imagine, says Plato, through his
interlocutor, Socrates, what it would be like to be unchained and dragged out
to the light outside. First, of course, the brilliant glare would be painful,
and one would crave a return to the dark familiarity of the cave. Ultimately,
however, the true wonder of the world would become intoxicating—so much so that
a return to one’s previous state of ignorant slavery would be unthinkable. And
even if one did return, how would it be possible to communicate the truth
without appearing mad to those who had no idea of it?
Plato argued, however, that this is
precisely the responsibility of a true philosopher. He must be willing to
forsake the comfort of his own safe vision of reality and embark on travels
through frightening new terrains of the mind. But more important, he must not
be content to remain in his ivory tower of learning, separate from the rest of
the human race, but must be willing to return to the world of men, to attempt
to educate those who govern the affairs of men in the true workings of the
universe.
When Socrates was asked, in Plato’s
dialogue, how one could penetrate the fog that shields us from the true
workings of reality, his response was particularly telling, especially in light
of our current scientific perspective. The answer involved the study of
abstractions—in particular, arithmetic, the science of numbers. Or, as he put
it, “Numbers, then, appear to lead towards the truth.”
The study of numbers, said Socrates,
should be followed by, in successively lesser importance, the study of
geometry, then astronomy—as far as it concerns the laws of motion—then perhaps
harmony, the study of sound. Only through the study of abstractions of the
mind—as he viewed these disciplines—could one release oneself from the chains
that bind us all to the rigid world of our senses.
These are just excerpts from the book.
For more, do read the book!
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