holograms take it outside

Geez, what’s wrong with you people? Yesterday, mind you on the weekend, I got 44 page requests. Don’t you have better things to do than read this drivel? Away! Away with you! If it keeps up like this I will definitely need to find a host that caters to the PHP crowd, and retool this site so it has the cookie-cutter appearance of every other blogger in this stupid internet universe.

Here’s something to think about. Holograms are 3D images encoded on 2D surfaces. All the information is located on a single two-dimensional layer, but manages to represent a three-dimensional object (I don’t know too much about holograms, and here’s where it would be wonderful for someone else to chime in with a post and clear things up for me… but since this is still a unidirectional exchange I will continue to preach as though I am the King Peach).

So. The universe is three-dimensional, but as a tangent let us discuss the possibility that it is four-dimensional. To visualize, pretend you are on a sphere. It could be the earth, a peach or the supple bosom of a loved one. When you move on the sphere it appears to you that you are travelling in a straight line in two dimensions, though anyone observing your movement from off the sphere would see that you are indeed moving in an arc, dropping away in the third dimension. If you were to travel in one direction long enough, you would curve around and eventually retrace your footsteps.

Now let’s say you travel in a straight line through space; a straight line in three dimensions. If space is four-dimensional you will actually be following an arc in the fourth dimension, and will eventually wind up back where you started. It’d be a long way, but arguably it’s possible. 4D space answers the question of what’s on the other side of the universe. What’s beyond the boundary? In short, nothing. If the universe is a four-dimensional sphere, it is completely self-contained and doesn’t need to exist in anything.

But holograms. What if… the universe is just the three-dimensional encoding of a four (or five) dimensional reality? The whole thing, the entirety of our reality, is just scratches on a wax cylinder, so to speak. If one were able to look at the universe from the outside and decode it, it would unfold into something entirely different… and unfortunately incomprehensible, as it is difficult to think in extended dimensions; even less to see them.

Well. I hope that one got you sad, sad people outside.