You and I are 3D object existing in a three spatial dimensions universe with an additional time dimension.
For the past century or so we’ve become accustomed with this idea so much so that our entire physical model relies on the works of Einstein and co. that envision the universe as such a 3+1D universe.
We have two very successful theories that describe our existence in our universe pretty well, and when I say that they’re describing existence pretty well I mean that they are successful in predicting what will happen to objects provided a set of initial conditions.
The problem is that we have two very successful theories that disagree with one another. One governs the laws of large objects such as apples, human, planets and galaxies, the other governs the laws of the small objects, the object that are the constituent parts of said large objects.
These theories are immensely successful on their own, but combined they break down and scientist are left to ponder the implications without any real ‘scientific method’ to assist them reaching new theories to solve the problems that these theories raise.
Black holes, dark matter and dark energy are just three of scientific ‘objects’ we’ve invented to cope with the problems that the theories of the large and small create.
These ‘imaginary’ objects that we had to conceive of because the evidence from the universe compels us to do so in regards to those two very successful theories.
We see galaxies that contain a lot less matter than what the gravitational theory predicts. So we invent dark matter and we claim that this matter exists in the galaxies making them ‘heavier’ but we cannot see, detect, or interact with this exotic form of matter, for some reason.
We see a universe filled with galaxies that are speeding away faster and faster from one another, and according to the aforementioned theory of gravity that shouldn’t happen, so we invented dark energy to ‘push’ galaxies away from one another as a fundamental property of space that expands space at ever increasing speeds. That dark energy we can’t see, probe, or investigate in any form, and we have zero evidence that such a thing exists apart from our observations of redshifted light coming from distant galaxies.
We predict a possibility of matter collapsing into a single point in space generating infinities once passed a certain threshold that throws us from the realm of the large object into the realm of the small objects, yet we don’t understand what happens and we have no way to probe, detect, or see black holes.
Perhaps the two theories aren’t so successful if they predict things that we cannot see even several decades after the initial proposal came to be. Not just cannot see, we don’t have the faintest idea of how it works.
Time, Energy, and Space
We are 3D objects, and we perceive our universe as a 3D plus 1 time dimension universe.
We can see a narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum, and up until a couple of hundred years ago, we didn’t even realize that the EM spectrum is far larger than what we can perceive with our eyes.
We can only see what we were ‘built’ to see.
In the same sense we might be living in a 4D universe yet only experience 3 dimensions simply because we manifest as 3 dimensional objects. This doesn’t necessarily means that there aren’t more dimensions out there.
On the contrary — some of the theories we’re inventing to combine the two successful theories are relying on different numbers of dimensions, some even have 11 dimensions, the 3 we know, plus 7 more tiny curled up dimensions that exist and interact with the realm of the super tiny fundamental particles.
The universe as we know it is actually a 4 dimensional object that we experience only three of simply because that’s the type of objects we are.
Time in this universe is not a dimension of itself, it’s rather a property of an object, just as object have mass that experience gravitational force in the 3D universe, time is another property of such objects and manifests in similar conditions.
In this universe four dimensional objects create a “time field” that they experience and require in order to have changes — since without time there is no change.
While the three dimensions that we experience create three dimensional objects that we can observe and interact with and experience the gravity resulting in coalescing of mass, the four dimensional universe create four dimensional objects that produces the time force we experience.
If we consider these four dimensional objects and their time fields that they generate, we can start looking at our observable universe with a new outlook.
In a similar fashion to how gravity is a property of mass, time is a property of energy.
When energy is concentrated it generates a time field allowing light to traverse freely inside the time field without expending energy, and like with mass where an objects “falls” to the center of mass, in time fields objects fall towards the ‘center of time’ — the future.
Outside of the time field, the four dimensional objects equivalent to galaxies and galaxy clusters, there is no time — objects that exist in this area will eventually bleed out all the energy, and as a result time.
This obviously happens to the four dimensional structures that we reside in, but thanks to the time field in our local area we do not experience the cost of expending time and from our perspective that moment where ‘we’re out of time’ is a few trillions of years ahead of us.
Just like with stars and galaxies that keep matter from evaporating and decaying, four dimensional structures keep energy from disappearing and withering down.
The reason we see the universe expanding, galaxies racing away from one another is not because they are in fact getting increasingly more distant from us in the spatial dimensions, in fact it might be that they simply increasingly further from us in the cost of reaching them. Which might seem to be similar and perhaps the reason for our way of thinking in regards to redshift.
While we can see our neighboring four dimensional objects in our skies we, as 3D objects falling down to the center of time, the future, can’t easily get to these neighbors of ours.
Light definitely can traverse the area between the four dimensional structures that afford us ‘infinite time’, but as we can see light can do that at a cost — the cost is in lights ability to retain its own time.
The further away the two four dimensional objects are from one another the more time light needs to expend to travel from one object to another, reaching its destination with less time than what it had when it left its origin resulting in what we perceive as galaxies speeding away from each other at ever increasing rates.
Vacuum Energy and Electron Orbitals
We now know that empty space is far from empty, so far from empty it’s actually the only thing that can ‘kill’ a black hole — every square centimeter of our eniverse is constantly creating pairs of particles that annihalate one another in a an instant.
We know that every particle we can observe interacts with other particles via a set of unseen forces that we often associate with ‘virtual particles’ transferring energy from one ‘real’ particle to another.
Both the virtual particles in particle interaction and the vacuum energy particles are coming in to existence and out of existence from realms that we currently can only describe in mathematical terms.
It might be the case that what we observe in both cases is four dimensional structures that exist always yet we observe them only in certain configurations, much like the sphere that can exist in 3D but only displays a point or a circle on 2D projection, the particles we experience are in fact 4D objects that manifest as leaping in and out of existence in 3D.
Going further and observing the electron orbitals and their various energy levels might also be 4D objects that we are allowed only a partial view of.
If indeed electron orbitals are 4D structure that could explain the unique geometrical aspects of the electron orbitals and perhaps allow us to peer deeper into the constituents of reality and possibly even interact with in new and previously unexplored methods.
Closing
I’ve been studying modern physics for the past decade and a half, I can’t say I’m anything of a scientist, far from it. At best I’d describe myself as a philosopher in this context.
While we fundamentally understand the universe as a 3D object, I’ve noticed a repeating pattern in both the gaps of our knowledge and the glimpses that we do get into reality that indeed there’s a strong possibility that we’re in fact in a 4D structure.
I don’t have the mathematical prowess to even attempt to describe my theory mathematically much less to prove it, so I won’t even try — that I leave to the mathematically capable.
The fact that most of the scientific community is extremely focused on a single potential solution to the problem of our inconsistencies in natural theories saddens me as the above preface shows that we’re in fact utterly blind in this area and most of current theories are closer to religious dogma than scientific theory.
As such, if our fundamentals are currently at the state that they are, new theories and new avenues could only help by providing us with different languages to describe what we experience.
