The Universe part 1
coordination

Dimensions

You will probably believe that right now you are sitting in a room reading this article. However, the reality of the situation is that you are not sitting in a room but that the room is sitting inside your mind.

We will come back to that in a part 2, but first let us consider what the Universe actually is.

We are all aware of the three dimensions of space, known as length, depth and width. Some people count time as a fourth dimension. Using these four dimensions we can pinpoint exactly where and when an event occurs in space-time.

I would like to add two more dimensions to my definition of the Universe.

Frequencies

Consider you are sat on a wooden chair listening to the radio.

Because you and the chair are both made of matter, the chair holds you up and you cannot both occupy the same space at the same time (space-time).

Light cannot pass through you or the chair and so, also, cannot occupy the same space-time.

However, as we look at energy with higher frequencies than light, it starts to be able to pass through you and occupy the same space-time. The radio wave, for instance, will be able to pass through you, but too much matter, such as a thick brick wall will stop it.

As the frequency gets really high, outside what is known as the EM spectrum, the waves of energy can pass through even more matter, maybe the whole Earth itself.

So, because, you and the radio waves can occupy the same space, at the same time, we have to add another dimension to pinpoint the difference in where you both exist in the Universe. This dimension I will call frequency.

Senses

Before we move on to the next dimension we should spend a few moments considering what ‘the five senses’ are.

As the name ‘sense’ implies, they sense information from the universe and relay it to our minds.

So, sight takes energy vibrating at the light frequencies and depending on the exact frequency translates this into colours in our mind. A single eye works in two dimensions and can give our mind information about where a colour is coming from with regards to height and width, then with two eyes and some trigonometry calculations, we can add a third dimension of depth to where that colour is coming from. It should be noted that we don’t actually see the chair in the room we see light bouncing off the chair.

Another thing to consider is that the radio could also be counted as a sense, just as our sense of sight takes energy of the light frequency and converts it into pictures, if humans had built in radios then we could take energy of radio wave frequencies and convert them into sounds.

Were we to have more senses, then we would perceive far more of the Universe.

This was highlighted in the episode Exit from the television series Battlestar Galactica where a robot voices his distain of having to experience the Universe with only human senses.