1994; 334 pages. Full Title: Hyperspace – A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the 10th Dimension. New Author? : No. Genres : Quantum Physics; Astrophysics; Science. Overall Rating : 9*/10.
We live in a universe that has ten
dimensions. Not nine. Not eleven.
Not three. Not four. There’s an outside chance that it actually
has twenty-six dimensions, but let’s not go there. Trying to visualize ten dimensions is going
to be enough of a challenge.
Part
of that is our eyes’ fault. We “see” in only
three dimensions – length, width, and depth. We
might say we also “see” in a fourth dimension, time, and that’s valid, but it’s a temporal
dimension, and here we are focusing on spatial ones.
Physicists
say the magic number is ten, and hey, they’re pretty smart. But they admit they can’t see those extra
dimensions either, their instruments can’t detect them, and they have no idea
where those added dimensions might be hiding.
I have to wonder then, why do they even think such things exist?
Michio Kaku gives us the answer early in this book: "The
laws of nature are simpler in higher dimensions."
Whatever that means. And that's why
I decided to read Hyperspace.
What’s To Like...
Michio Kaku divides the fifteen chapters in Hyperspace into four sections, namely:
Part 1: Entering the
Fifth Dimension (Chapters 1-4)
The early days of theorizing about higher dimensions, up through
Einstein’s “e = mc2”.
Part 2: Unification in
Ten Dimensions (Chapters 5-9)
Quantum Physics, Superstrings, and what happened before the Big Bang.
Part 3: Wornholes:
Gateway to Another Universe? (Chapters 10-12)
Black Holes, Parallel Universes, and Time Machines.
Part 4: Masters of Hyperspace. (Chapters
13-15)
How the World ends and how Ten Dimensions may provide an escape hatch.
The
chapters all have catchy titles, such as “Mathematicians and Mystics”, “The Man Who ‘Saw’ the
Fourth Dimension”, “Einstein’s Revenge”, and “Signals from the Tenth Dimension”. I found each section to be fascinating, but my
favorite was Part 3’s chapters where Michio Kaku shows how to create a black
hole that connects with a parallel world (which is not the same as a “multiverse”), how
to build a Time Machine, and how we might interact with Multiverses.
Michio Kaku demonstrates a clever way to
visualize a fourth spatial dimension by creating a two-dimensional world (a stick figure
on a sheet of paper), and asks us to imagine what happens if we
“peel” that guy off the sheet of paper and immerse him in our 3-D world. His eyes only work in two dimensions, so he
sees magical things appearing out of nowhere, then disappearing just as miraculously. Amazingly, a book was written
in 1884 about such a two-dimensional world, titled Flatland by Edwin Abbot Abbot. My local digital
library has several copies of it (it is only of novella length), and I’ll
probably borrow and read it sometime soon.
There
is of course lots of “sciency” stuff in the book, including mathematics (learn what’s so
special about the number “1729”), chemistry (what phases does an ice
cube undergo as you heat it to 1032 °K), and futurology (eight different
ways the world might end). We
spend a lot of time examining subatomic particles (there are hundreds of different kinds of
them), and even how a much-ridiculed branch of mysticism called Theosophy embraced the concept of higher
dimensions.
As
I expected, Michio Kaku’s infectious optimism shines throughout the book, but
it was also enlightening to learn some anecdotal details of his life. In high school, he built his own atom smasher
in his parents’ garage, no small feat both from an engineering and a financial
standpoint. And watching the carp swim
around in a pond at the Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco triggered his
youthful mind to ponder the imponderable: higher dimensions. I am in awe of his thought processes.
Excerpts...
Throughout this
book, we have emphasized the fact that the laws of physics unify when we add
higher dimensions. When studying the Big
Bang, we see the precise reverse of this statement. The Big Bang, as we shall see, perhaps
originated in the breakdown of the original ten-dimensional universe into a
four- and six-dimensional universe. Thus
we can view the history of the Big Bang as the history of the breakup of
ten-dimensional space and hence the breakup of previously unified symmetries. This, in turn, is the theme of this book in
reverse. (pg. 195)
Futurology has
deservedly earned this unsavory reputation because every “scientific” poll
conducted by futurologists about the next decade has proved to be wildly off
the mark. What makes futurology such a
primitive science is that our brains think linearly, while knowledge progresses
exponentially. For example, polls of
futurologists have shown that they take known technology and simply double or
triple it to predict the future. Polls
taken in the 1920s showed that futurologists predicted that we would have,
within a few decades, huge fleets of blimps taking passengers across the
Atlantic. (pg. 276)
As we approach the speed of light, we are blissfully unaware that
we are turning into slow-witted pancakes.
(pg. 83 )
I
can’t find much to quibble about Michio Kaku’s writing, opinions, and/or
scientific history in Hyperspace. My biggest criticism has to do with the
theories themselves, which were developed by other physicists along the way.
It
isn’t that those theories are wrong – it’s that in most cases they can’t be
verified by testing. The ten-dimension
universe is a mathematical construct created by physicists to aid in finding the elusive
GUT, the “Grand Unified Theory” which will unite the laws of macro-physics (“Newtonian”),
micro-physics (Quantum),
and Gravity into one cohesive and easy-to-understand system. Thus far, GUT is a pipe-dream, ten dimensions or
not.
I
could gripe that I had almost zero comprehension of Chapter 6, “Einstein’s
Revenge”, but that’s mostly a reflection of my mental acuity (or lack thereof),
not the author’s presentation. Also , a
section in the concluding Chapter of the book regarding "Holism vs. Reductivism" seemed silly to me, but then, I’m solidly in the Reductivist camp,
and it’s really more relevant to the arts than to science.
That’s
about it. To be clear, Hyperspace was a slow-yet-fascinating
read for me, which is what I expect whenever I pick up a book on Quantum
Physics. It answered my fundamental
question: “What’s
the Big Deal about Ten Dimensions”, and if there’s no direct evidence for it, along with
multiverses, parallel worlds, time travel, and wormholes, well, so what? Check back in a thousand years or so (or maybe just a
hundred), and the answer will quite likely be significantly
different.
9 Stars. If you’ve been thinking about reading a book on Quantum Physics, but are scared that it will all be “over your head”, here’s my present list of writers on the subject, ranked from “most reader-friendly” to “most challenging”: Lisa Randall - Michio Kaku - Neil DeGrasse Tyson - Brian Greene - Stephen Hawking. The order is subject to change as I read more books, and additions of other authors as I broaden my literary-&-scientific horizons.
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