Hyperspace (2 page)
Authors: Michio Kaku,Robert O'Keefe
Since the hyperspace theory is a well-defined body of mathematical equations, we can calculate the precise energy necessary to twist space and time into a pretzel or to create wormholes linking distant parts of our universe. Unfortunately, the results are disappointing. The energy required far exceeds anything that our planet can muster. In fact, the energy is a quadrillion times larger than the energy of our largest atom smashers. We must wait centuries or even millennia until our civilization develops the technical capability of manipulating space-time, or hope for contact with an advanced civilization that has already mastered hyperspace. The book therefore ends by exploring the intriguing but speculative scientific question of what level of technology is necessary for us to become masters of hyperspace.
Because the hyperspace theory takes us far beyond normal, commonsense
conceptions of space and time, I have scattered throughout the text a few purely hypothetical stories. I was inspired to utilize this pedagogical technique by the story of Nobel Prize winner Isidore I. Rabi addressing an audience of physicists. He lamented the abysmal state of science education in the United States and scolded the physics community for neglecting its duty in popularizing the adventure of science for the general public and especially for the young. In fact, he admonished, science-fiction writers had done more to communicate the romance of science than all physicists combined.
In a previous book,
Beyond Einstein: The Cosmic Quest for the Theory of the Universe
(coauthored with Jennifer Trainer), I investigated super-string theory, described the nature of subatomic particles, and discussed at length the
visible universe
and how all the complexities of matter might be explained by tiny, vibrating strings. In this book, I have expanded on a different theme and explored the
invisible universe
—that is, the world of geometry and space-time. The focus of this book is not the nature of subatomic particles, but the higher-dimensional world in which they probably live. In the process, readers will see that higher-dimensional space, instead of being an empty, passive backdrop against which quarks play out their eternal roles, actually becomes the central actor in the drama of nature.
In discussing the fascinating history of the hyperspace theory, we will see that the search for the ultimate nature of matter, begun by the Greeks 2 millennia ago, has been a long and tortuous one. When the final chapter in this long saga is written by future historians of science, they may well record that the crucial breakthrough was the defeat of common-sense theories of three or four dimensions and the victory of the theory of hyperspace.
New York
May 1993
M.K.
In writing this book, I have been fortunate to have Jeffrey Robbins as my editor. He was the editor who skillfully guided the progress of three of my previous textbooks in theoretical physics written for the scientific community, concerning the unified field theory, superstring theory, and quantum field theory. This book, however, marks the first popular science book aimed at a general audience that I have written for him. It has always been a rare privilege to work closely with him.
I would also like to thank Jennifer Trainer, who has been my coauthor on two previous popular books. Once again, she has applied her considerable skills to make the presentation as smooth and coherent as possible.
I am also grateful to numerous other individuals who have helped to strengthen and criticize earlier drafts of this book: Burt Solomon, Leslie Meredith, Eugene Mallove, and my agent, Stuart Krichevsky.
Finally, I would like to thank the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, where much of this book was written, for its hospitality. The Institute, where Einstein spent the last decades of his life, was an appropriate place to write about the revolutionary developments that have extended and embellished much of his pioneering work.
Part I Entering the Fifth Dimension
1. Worlds Beyond Space and Time
3. The Man Who “Saw” the Fourth Dimension
4. The Secret of Light: Vibrations in the Fifth Dimension
Part II Unification in Ten Dimensions
8. Signals from the Tenth Dimension
Part III Wormholes: Gateways to Another Universe?
10. Black Holes and Parallel Universes
References and Suggested Reading
Entering
the Fifth Dimension
But the creative principle resides in mathematics. In a certain sense, therefore, I hold it true that pure thought can grasp reality, as the ancients dreamed.
Albert Einstein
Worlds Beyond Space
and Time
I want to know how God created this world. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon. I want to know His thoughts, the rest are details.
Albert Einstein
TWO incidents from my childhood greatly enriched my understanding of the world and sent me on course to become a theoretical physicist.
I remember that my parents would sometimes take me to visit the famous Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco. One of my happiest childhood memories is of crouching next to the pond, mesmerized by the brilliantly colored carp swimming slowly beneath the water lilies.
In these quiet moments, I felt free to let my imagination wander; I would ask myself silly questions that a only child might ask, such as how the carp in that pond would view the world around them. I thought, What a strange world theirs must be!
Living their entire lives in the shallow pond, the carp would believe that their “universe” consisted of the murky water and the lilies. Spending most of their time foraging on the bottom of the pond, they would be only dimly aware that an alien world could exist above the surface.
The nature of my world was beyond their comprehension. I was intrigued that I could sit only a few inches from the carp, yet be separated from them by an immense chasm. The carp and I spent our lives in two distinct universes, never entering each other’s world, yet were separated by only the thinnest barrier, the water’s surface.
I once imagined that there may be carp “scientists” living among the fish. They would, I thought, scoff at any fish who proposed that a parallel world could exist just above the lilies. To a carp “scientist,” the only things that were real were what the fish could see or touch. The pond was everything. An unseen world beyond the pond made no scientific sense.
Once I was caught in a rainstorm. I noticed that the pond’s surface was bombarded by thousands of tiny raindrops. The pond’s surface became turbulent, and the water lilies were being pushed in all directions by water waves. Taking shelter from the wind and the rain, I wondered how all this appeared to the carp. To them, the water lilies would appear to be moving around by themselves, without anything pushing them. Since the water they lived in would appear invisible, much like the air and space around us, they would be baffled that the water lilies could move around by themselves.
Their “scientists,” I imagined, would concoct a clever invention called a “force” in order to hide their ignorance. Unable to comprehend that there could be waves on the unseen surface, they would conclude that lilies could move without being touched because a mysterious, invisible entity called a force acted between them. They might give this illusion impressive, lofty names (such as action-at-a-distance, or the ability of the lilies to move without anything touching them).
Once I imagined what would happen if I reached down and lifted one of the carp “scientists” out of the pond. Before I threw him back into the water, he might wiggle furiously as I examined him. I wondered how this would appear to the rest of the carp. To them, it would be a truly unsettling event. They would first notice that one of their “scientists” had disappeared from their universe. Simply vanished, without leaving a trace. Wherever they would look, there would be no evidence of the missing carp in their universe. Then, seconds later, when I threw him back into the pond, the “scientist” would abruptly reappear out of nowhere. To the other carp, it would appear that a miracle had happened.
After collecting his wits, the “scientist” would tell a truly amazing story. “Without warning,” he would say, “I was somehow lifted out of the universe (the pond) and hurled into a mysterious nether world, with
blinding lights and strangely shaped objects that I had never seen before. The strangest of all was the creature who held me prisoner, who did not resemble a fish in the slightest. I was shocked to see that it had no fins whatsoever, but nevertheless could move without them. It struck me that the familiar laws of nature no longer applied in this nether world. Then, just as suddenly, I found myself thrown back into our universe.” (This story, of course, of a journey beyond the universe would be so fantastic that most of the carp would dismiss it as utter poppycock.)
I often think that we are like the carp swimming contentedly in that pond. We live out our lives in our own “pond,” confident that our universe consists of only those things we can see or touch. Like the carp, our universe consists of only the familiar and the visible. We smugly refuse to admit that parallel universes or dimensions can exist next to ours, just beyond our grasp. If our scientists invent concepts like forces, it is only because they cannot visualize the invisible vibrations that fill the empty space around us. Some scientists sneer at the mention of higher dimensions because they cannot be conveniently measured in the laboratory.
Ever since that time, I have been fascinated by the possibility of other dimensions. Like most children, I devoured adventure stories in which time travelers entered other dimensions and explored unseen parallel universes, where the usual laws of physics could be conveniently suspended. I grew up wondering if ships that wandered into the Bermuda Triangle mysteriously vanished into a hole in space; I marveled at Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Series, in which the discovery of hyperspace travel led to the rise of a Galactic Empire.
A second incident from my childhood also made a deep, lasting impression on me. When I was 8 years old, I heard a story that would stay with me for the rest of my life. I remember my schoolteachers telling the class about a great scientist who had just died. They talked about him with great reverence, calling him one of the greatest scientists in all history. They said that very few people could understand his ideas, but that his discoveries changed the entire world and everything around us. I didn’t understand much of what they were trying to tell us, but what most intrigued me about this man was that he died before he could complete his greatest discovery. They said he spent years on this theory, but he died with his unfinished papers still sitting on his desk.
I was fascinated by the story. To a child, this was a great mystery. What was his unfinished work? What was in those papers on his desk? What problem could possibly be so difficult and so important that such a great scientist would dedicate years of his life to its pursuit? Curious, I
decided to learn all I could about Albert Einstein and his unfinished theory. I still have warm memories of spending many quiet hours reading every book I could find about this great man and his theories. When I exhausted the books in our local library, I began to scour libraries and bookstores across the city, eagerly searching for more clues. I soon learned that this story was far more exciting than any murder mystery and more important than anything I could ever imagine. I decided that I would try to get to the root of this mystery, even if I had to become a theoretical physicist to do it.
I soon learned that the unfinished papers on Einstein’s desk were an attempt to construct what he called the unified field theory, a theory that could explain all the laws of nature, from the tiniest atom to the largest galaxy. However, being a child, I didn’t understand that perhaps there was a link between the carp swimming in the Tea Garden and the unfinished papers lying on Einstein’s desk. I didn’t understand that higher dimensions might be the key to solving the unified field theory.
Later, in high school, I exhausted most of the local libraries and often visited the Stanford University physics library. There, I came across the fact that Einstein’s work made possible a new substance called antimatter, which would act like ordinary matter but would annihilate upon contact with matter in a burst of energy. I also read that scientists had built large machines, or “atom smashers,” that could produce microscopic quantities of this exotic substance in the laboratory.
One advantage of youth is that it is undaunted by worldly constraints that would ordinarily seem insurmountable to most adults. Not appreciating the obstacles involved, I set out to build my own atom smasher. I studied the scientific literature until I was convinced that I could build what was called a betatron, which could boost electrons to millions of electron volts. (A million electron volts is the energy attained by electrons accelerated by a field of a million volts.)
First, I purchased a small quantity of sodium-22, which is radioactive and naturally emits positrons (the antimatter counterpart of electrons). Then I built what is called a cloud chamber, which makes visible the tracks left by subatomic particles. I was able to take hundreds of beautiful photographs of the tracks left behind by antimatter. Next, I scavenged around large electronic warehouses in the area, assembled the necessary hardware, including hundreds of pounds of scrap transformer steel, and built a 2.3-million-electron-volt betatron in my garage that would be powerful enough to produce a beam of antielectrons. To construct the monstrous magnets necessary for the betatron, I convinced my parents to help me wind 22 miles of cooper wire on the high-school football field.
We spent Christmas vacation on the 50-yard line, winding and assembling the massive coils that would bend the paths of the high-energy electrons.