Hyperspace (14 page)

In “The Monster from Nowhere,” writer Nelson Bond tried to imagine what would happen if an explorer in the jungles of Latin America encountered a beast from a higher dimension.

Our hero is Burch Patterson, adventurer, bon vivant, and soldier of fortune, who hits on the idea of capturing wild animals in the towering mountains of Peru. The expedition will be paid for by various zoos,
which put up the money for the trip in return for whatever animals Patterson can find. With much hoopla and fanfare, the press covers the progress of the expedition as it journeys into unexplored territory. But after a few weeks, the expedition loses contact with the outside world and mysteriously disappears without a trace. After a long and futile search, the authorities reluctantly give the explorers up for dead.

Two years later, Burch Patterson abruptly reappears. He meets secretly with reporters and tells them an astonishing story of tragedy and heroism. Just before the expedition disappeared, it encountered a fantastic animal in the Maratan Plateau of upper Peru, an unearthly bloblike creature that was constantly changing shape in the most bizarre fashion. These black blobs hovered in midair, disappearing and reappearing and changing shape and size. The blobs then unexpectedly attacked the expedition, killing most of the men. The blobs hoisted some of the remaining men off the ground; they screamed and then disappeared into thin air.

Only Burch escaped the rout. Dazed and frightened, he nonetheless studied these blobs from a distance and gradually formed a theory about what they were and how to capture them. He had read
Flatland
years before, and imagined that anyone sticking his fingers into and out of Flatland would startle the two-dimensional inhabitants. The Flatlanders would see pulsating rings of flesh hovering in midair (our fingers poking through Flatland), constantly changing size. Likewise, reasoned Patterson, any higher-dimensional creature sticking his foot or arms through our universe would appear as three-dimensional, pulsating blobs of flesh, appearing out of nowhere and constantly changing shape and size. That would also explain why his team members had disappeared into thin air: They had been dragged into a higher-dimensional universe.

But one question still plagued him: How do you capture a higher-dimensional being? If a Flatlander, seeing our finger poke its way through his two-dimensional universe, tried to capture our finger, he would be at a loss. If he tried to lasso our finger, we could simply remove our finger and disappear. Similarly, Patterson reasoned, he could put a net around one of these blobs, but then the higher-dimensional creature could simply pull his “finger” or “leg” out of our universe, and the net would collapse.

Suddenly, the answer came to him: If a Flatlander were to try to capture our finger as it poked its way into Flatland, the Flatlander could stick a needle
through our finger
, painfully impaling it to the two-dimensional universe. Thus Patterson’s strategy was to drive a spike through one of the blobs and impale the creature in our universe!

After months of observing the creature, Patterson identified what looked like the creature’s “foot” and drove a spike right through it. It took him 2 years to capture the creature and ship the writhing, struggling blob back to New Jersey.

Finally, Patterson announces a major press conference where he will unveil a fantastic creature caught in Peru. Journalists and scientists alike gasp in horror when the creature is unveiled, writhing and struggling against a large steel rod. Like a scene from
King Kong
, one newspaperman, against the rules, takes flash pictures of the creature. The flash enrages the creature, which then struggles so hard against the rod that its flesh begins to tear. Suddenly, the monster is free, and pandemonium breaks out. People are torn to shreds, and Patterson and others are grabbed by the creature and then disappear into the fourth dimension.

In the aftermath of the tragedy, one of the survivors of the massacre decides to burn all evidence of the creature. Better to leave this mystery forever unsolved.

In the previous section, the question of what happens when we encounter a higher-dimensional being was explored. But what happens in the reverse situation, when we visit a higher-dimensional universe? As we have seen, a Flatlander cannot possibly visualize a three-dimensional universe in its entirety. However, there are, as Hinton showed, several ways in which the Flatlander can comprehend revealing fragments of higher-dimensional universes.

In his classic short story “… And He Built a Crooked House …,” Robert Heinlein explored the many possibilities of living in an unraveled hypercube.

Quintus Teal is a brash, flamboyant architect whose ambition is to build a house in a truly revolutionary shape: a tesseract, a hypercube that has been unraveled in the third dimension. He cons his friends Mr. and Mrs. Bailey into buying the house.

Built in Los Angeles, the tesseract is a series of eight ultramodern cubes stacked on top of one another in the shape of a cross. Unfortunately, just as Teal is about to show off his new creation to the Baileys, an earthquake strikes southern California, and the house collapses into itself. The cubes begin to topple, but strangely only a single cube is left standing. The other cubes have mysteriously disappeared. When Teal and the Baileys cautiously enter the house, now just a single cube, they
are amazed that the other missing rooms are clearly visible through the windows of the first floor. But that is impossible. The house is now only a single cube. How can the interior of a single cube be connected to a series of other cubes that cannot be seen from the outside?

They climb the stairs and find the master bedroom above the entry-way. Instead of finding the third floor, however, they find themselves back on the ground floor. Thinking the house is haunted, the frightened Baileys race to the front door. Instead of leading to the outside, the front door just leads to another room. Mrs. Bailey faints.

As they explore the house, they find that each room is connected to an impossible series of other rooms. In the original house, each cube had windows to view the outside. Now, all windows face other rooms. There is no outside!

Scared out of their wits, they slowly try all the doors of the house, only to wind up in other rooms. Finally, in the study they decide to open the four Venetian blinds and look outside. When they open the first Venetian blind, they find that they are peering down at the Empire State Building. Apparently, that window opened up to a “window” in space just above the spire of the tower. When they open the second Venetian blind, they find themselves staring at a vast ocean, except it is upside down. Opening the third Venetian blind, they find themselves looking at Nothing. Not empty space. Not inky blackness. Just Nothing. Finally, opening up the last Venetian blind, they find themselves gazing at a bleak desert landscape, probably a scene from Mars.

After a harrowing tour through the rooms of the house, with each room impossibly connected to the other rooms, Teal finally figures it all out. The earthquake, he reasons, must have collapsed the joints of various cubes and folded the house in the fourth dimension.
¹⁰

On the outside, Teal’s house originally looked like an ordinary sequence of cubes. The house did not collapse because the joints between the cubes were rigid and stable in three dimensions. However, viewed from the fourth dimension, Teal’s house is an unraveled hypercube that can be reassembled or folded back into a hypercube. Thus when the house was shaken by the earthquake, it somehow folded up in four dimensions, leaving only a single cube dangling in our third dimension. Anyone walking into the single remaining cube would view a series of rooms connected in a seemingly impossible fashion. By racing through the various rooms, Teal has moved through the fourth dimension without noticing it.

Although our protagonists seem doomed to spend their lives fruitlessly wandering in circles inside a hypercube, another violent earthquake
shakes the tesseract. Holding their breath, Teal and the terrified Baileys leap out the nearest window. When they land, they find themselves in Joshua Tree National Monument, miles from Los Angeles. Hours later, hitching a ride back to the city, they return to the house, only to find that the last remaining cube has vanished. Where did the tesseract go? It is probably drifting somewhere in the fourth dimension.

In retrospect, Riemann’s famous lecture was popularized to a wide audience via mystics, philosophers, and artists, but did little to further our understanding of nature. From the perspective of modern physics, we can also see why the years 1860 to 1905 did not produce any fundamental breakthroughs in our understanding of hyperspace.

First, there was no attempt to use hyperspace to simplify the laws of nature. Without Riemann’s original guiding principle—that the laws of nature become simple in higher dimensions—scientists during this period were groping in the dark. Riemann’s seminal idea of using geometry—that is, crumpled hyperspace—to explain the essence of a “force” was forgotten during those years.

Second, there was no attempt to exploit Faraday’s field concept or Riemann’s metric tensor to find the field equations obeyed by hyperspace. The mathematical apparatus developed by Riemann became a province of pure mathematics, contrary to Riemann’s original intentions. Without field theory, you cannot make any predictions with hyperspace.

Thus by the turn of the century, the cynics claimed (with justification) that there was no experimental confirmation of the fourth dimension. Worse, they claimed, there was no physical motivation for introducing the fourth dimension, other than to titillate the general public with ghost stories. This deplorable situation would soon change, however. Within a few decades, the theory of the fourth dimension (of time) would forever change the course of human history. It would give us the atomic bomb and the theory of Creation itself. And the man who would do it would be an obscure physicist named Albert Einstein.

If [relativity] should prove to be correct, as I expect it will, he will be considered the Copernicus of the twentieth century.

Max Planck on Albert Einstein

THE life of Albert Einstein appeared to be one long series of failures and disappointments. Even his mother was distressed at how slowly he learned to talk. His elementary-school teachers thought him a foolish dreamer. They complained that he was constantly disrupting classroom discipline with his silly questions. One teacher even told the boy bluntly that he would prefer that Einstein drop out of his class.

He had few friends in school. Losing interest in his courses, he dropped out of high school. Without a high-school diploma, he had to take special exams to enter college, but he did not pass them and had to take them a second time. He even failed the exam for the Swiss military because he had flat feet.

After graduation, he could not get a job. He was an unemployed physicist who was passed over for a teaching position at the university and was rejected for jobs everywhere he applied. He earned barely 3 francs an hour—a pittance—by tutoring students. He told his friend Maurice Solovine that “an easier way of earning a living would be to play the violin in public places.”

Einstein was a man who rejected the things most men chase after, such as power and money. However, he once noted pessimistically, “By the mere existence of his stomach, everyone is condemned to participate in that chase.” Finally, through the influence of a friend, he landed a lowly job as a clerk at the Swiss patent office in Bern, earning just enough money so his parents would not have to support him. On his meager salary, he supported his young wife and their newborn baby.

Lacking financial resources or connections with the scientific establishment, Einstein began to work in solitude at the patent office. In between patent applications, his mind drifted to problems that had intrigued him as a youth. He then undertook a task that would eventually change the course of human history. His tool was the fourth dimension.

Wherein lies the essence of Einstein’s genius? In
The Ascent of Man
, Jacob Bronowski wrote: “The genius of men like Newton and Einstein lies in that: they ask transparent, innocent questions which turn out to have catastrophic answers. Einstein was a man who could ask immensely simple questions.”
¹
As a child, Einstein asked himself the simple question: What would a light beam look like if you could catch up with one? Would you see a stationary wave, frozen in time? This question set him on a 50-year journey through the mysteries of space and time.

Imagine trying to overtake a train in a speeding car. If we hit the gas pedal, our car races neck-and-neck with the train. We can peer inside the train, which now appears to be at rest. We can see the seats and the people, who are acting as though the train weren’t moving. Similarly, Einstein as a child imagined traveling alongside a light beam. He thought that the light beam should resemble a series of stationary waves, frozen in time; that is, the light beam should appear motionless.

When Einstein was 16 years old, he spotted the flaw in this argument. He recalled later,

After ten years of reflection such a principle resulted from a paradox upon which I had already hit at the age of sixteen: If I pursue a beam of light with the velocity
c
(velocity of light in a vacuum) I should observe such a beam of light as a spatially oscillatory electromagnetic field at rest. However,
there seems to be no such thing, whether on the basis of experience or according to Maxwell’s equations.
²

In college, Einstein confirmed his suspicions. He learned that light can be expressed in terms of Faraday’s electric and magnetic fields, and that these fields obey the field equations found by James Clerk Maxwell. As he suspected, he found that stationary, frozen waves are not allowed by Maxwell’s field equations. In fact, Einstein showed that a light beam travels at the
same
velocity
c
, no matter how hard you try to catch up with it.