Hyperspace (61 page)

’t Hooft, Gerard, 118–119, 121, 148, 325

Thorne, Kip, 20, 245–249

Time travel, 18–20, 232–251

Tipler, Frank, 244, 308–310

Townsend, Paul, 149

Trainer, Jennifer, xi, xii, 322

Trefil, James S., 319

Treiman, Samuel, 151

Tunneling, 116, 208

Type I, II, III civilizations, 277–279, 290–292, 301–303

Unified field theory, 6, 98, 112

Unti, Theodore, 243

Updike, John, 187

Vacuum, false, 209, 211

Vafa, Cumrum, 202

van Nieuwenhuizen, Peter, 145, 147–150

van Stockum, W. J., 244

Veltman, Martinus, 119, 148

Veneziano, Gabriel, 160–161, 167, 170, 325

Virasoro, Miguel, 162

von Fraunhofer, Joseph, 186

von Helmholtz, Hermann, 10, 44–45, 314

von Neumann, John, 309

Vranceanu, George, 104–105

Wave function of the universe, 254–255, 264–265

W
bosons, 114, 122

Weak interactions, 14, 114, 122, 196, 213

Weber, Wilhelm, 35, 50

Weinberg, Steven, 9, 121, 124, 140, 148, 179, 259

Weisskopf, Victor, 94, 315

Welles, H. G., 20, 22, 59–61, 84, 96, 232, 249

Wetherill, George W., 283

White dwarf, 220

Whitehead, Alfred North, 327

Wigner, Eugene, 328

Wilczek, Frank, 262–263

Wilde, Oscar, 22, 59

Willink, Arthur, 21, 55, 340n.2

Wilson, Edward O., 331

Wilson, Robert, 197

Witten, Edward, 151–152, 161, 179, 188, 207, 316, 344n.6, 347n.3

Witten, Leonard, 151

World line, 237–239

Wormholes, x, xi, 17, 24, 213, 224–226, 228–231, 246–247, 256, 266–268

Wulf, Theodor, 184

Wyndham, John, 265

Xenophanes, 257

Yang, C. N., 26, 118, 129

Yang-Mills field, 26, 118, 121–123, 132, 134, 140, 142, 143, 325

Yu, Loh-ping, 165

Yukawa, Hideki, 166

Yurtsever, Ulvi, 245

Z boson, 122

Zollner, Johann, 49–53, 84, 339n.l3

*
Surprisingly, even today physicists still do not have a real answer to this puzzle, but over the decades we have simply gotten used to the idea that light can travel through a vacuum even if there is nothing to wave.

*
The theory of higher dimensions is certainly not merely an academic one, because the simplest consequence of Einstein’s theory is the atomic bomb, which has changed the destiny of humanity. In this sense, the introduction of higher dimensions has been one of the pivotal scientific discoveries in all human history.

*
Freund chuckles when asked when we will be able to see these higher dimensions. We cannot see these higher dimensions because they have “curled up” into a tiny ball so small that they can no longer be detected. According to Kaluza-Klein theory, the size of these curled up dimensions is called the
Planck length,
⁴
which is 100 billion billion times smaller than the proton, too small to be probed by even by our largest atom smasher. High-energy physicists had hoped that the $11 billion superconducting supercollider (SSC) (which was canceled by Congress in October 1993) might have been able to reveal some indirect glimmers of hyperspace.

*
It wasn’t surprising that a clergyman wrote the novel, since theologians of the Church of England were among the first to jump into the fray created by the sensationalized trial. For uncounted centuries, clergymen had skillfully dodged such perennial questions as Where are heaven and hell? and Where do angels live? Now, they found a convenient resting place for these heavenly bodies: the fourth dimension. The Christian spiritualist A. T. Schofield, in his 1888 book
Another World
, argued at length that God and the spirits resided in the fourth dimension.
¹
Not to be outdone, in 1893 the theologian Arthur Willink wrote
The World of the Unseen
, in which he claimed that it was unworthy of God to reside in the lowly fourth dimension. Willink claimed that the only domain magnificent enough for God was infinite-dimensional space.
²

*
Wells was not the first to speculate that time could be viewed as a new type of fourth dimension, different from a spatial one. Jean d’Alembert had considered time as the fourth dimension in his 1754 article “Dimension.”

*
Similarly, passengers riding in the train would think that the train was at rest and that the subway station was coming toward the train. They would see the platform and everyone standing on it compressed like an accordian. Then this leads us to a contradiction, that people on the train and in the station each think that the other has been compressed. The resolution of this paradox is a bit delicate.
³

*
For example, imagine being a lifeguard on a beach, at some distance from the water; out of the corner of your eye, you spy someone drowning in the ocean far off at an angle. Assume that you can run very slowly in the soft sand, but can swim swiftly in the water. A straight path to the victim will spend too much time on the sand. The path with the least time is a bent line, one that reduces the time spent running on the sand and maximizes the time spent swimming in the water.

*
SU stands for “special unitary” matrices—that is, matrices that have unit determinant and are unitary.

*
Half-life
is the amount of time it takes for half of a substance to disintegrate. After two half-lives, only one-quarter of the substance remains.

*
In the
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society
, he wrote, “If the semi-diameter of a sphere of the same density with the Sun were to exceed that of the Sun in the proportion of 500 to 1, a body falling from an infinite height towards it, would have acquired at its surface greater velocity than that of light, and consequently supposing light to be attracted by the same force in proportion to its
vis inertiae
, with other bodies, all light emitted from such a body would be made to return to it by its own proper gravity.”
²

*
So perhaps we shouldn’t be so enthusiastic about making contact with intelligent extraterrestrials. Scientists point out that on the earth, there are two types of animals: predators like cats, dogs, and tigers (which have eyes to the front of their face, so they can stereoscopically zero in on their target) and prey like rabbits and deer (which have eyes to the side of their face in order to look around 360 degrees for the predators). Typically, predators are more intelligent then prey. Tests show that cats are more intelligent than mice, and foxes are more intelligent than rabbits. Humans, with eyes to the front, are also predators. In our search for intelligent life in the heavens, we should keep in mind that the aliens we meet will probably also have evolved from predators.

*
Another theory that might explain periodic extinctions on this vast time scale is the orbit of our solar system around the Milky Way galaxy. The solar system actually dips below and above the galactic plane in its orbit around the galaxy, much like carousel horses move up and down as a merry-go-round turns. As it dips periodically through the galactic plane, the solar system may encounter large quantities of dust that disturb the Oort cloud, bringing down a hail of comets.