The Cube in a Spherical Room: Doorway to Our Ten-Dimensional Reality
by Mark Thomas
Staff Writer
THE THOUGHT EXPERIMENT: OPENING TO THE HIGHER DIMENSIONS
“The key to growth is the introduction of higher dimensions of consciousness into our awareness.” (Lau Tzu)
The thought experiment that got you here was simple. Just your runaway imagination spinning out more of the usual. Mind-bending, philosophical – distorting physics with hopes of a new perspective on something others have overlooked. And worthy perhaps of a good debate with students – maybe your girlfriend if she’s over the last one.
What you’re facing now is as disturbing as it is enlightening. And the complexity is, at least for the moment an unknown. Stepping out onto Bancroft after leaving the university, you’re experiencing something new and fruitfully disquieting.
Paranoia.
That guy in the Tesla – the woman in the door to Ramone’s – the girl locking her bike to a pole. All eyeing you as if they know what happened and what you saw an hour ago in the basement lab at Birge. And the output from Log_5.0, the LLM you’ve grown fond of.
You stop at the light and look down the hill. And now adding to the paranoia that you’ve unlocked or climbed into or did who knows what - something Log_5.0 termed a ‘violation of local realism,’ you’re convinced something else is happening.
The light is strange. No longer homogeneous or wavelike, it’s shimmering like streams of polytopal photons. When you turn your head, it changes into sunlight through bevelled glass. And looking up, you’d swear you’re seeing the blue wavelengths scatter out as they hit the atmosphere.
What happened to you back in the lab? Did you break some fundamental law of physics while trying to reinterpret dimensionality? Or have you done something to your head with an experiment meant to enhance observation and prove a theory?
SUPERSTRING THEORY: A TUTORIAL ON EXTRA DIMENSIONS
“All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.” (Edgar Allen Poe)
Image by StockCake
Rather than the three spatial dimensions and time we can perceive, superstring theory presents a 10-dimensional framework: Nine spatial dims plus time. With some in the field extending it to eleven. According to the theorists, it’s in the 5th and 6th dimensions where the idea of possible worlds arises.
If you could see into the 5th dimension, you’d see a world that would be slightly different from our own. Classically stated, you would gain the means of measuring the similarity and differences between our world and possible other ones.
It gets deeper, and the profound quotes are many. With this one by Leonard Susskind mostly responsible for sparking your curiosity and moving you in the direction of your Cube in a Spherical Room thought experiment: “Dimensions are simply the different facets of what we perceive to be reality.”
To you, standing there at the corner of Dana looking up at Wesley House – seeing it clearly from the north, south, east and west – and every point in between, you’re convinced you’ve either proven your theory that it’s perception at any level of dimensionality, or you’ve twisted your brain inside out and need to head over to radiology for a Cat scan.
But let’s face it. Does a blind quadriplegic perceive thus exist in three spatial dimensions? Does a person in a coma or asleep? Do we leave those three dimensions plus time when we drop into dreamland? Think about that one. Recall anything like height, width and depth or time in your last dream? Or any dream?!
This brings you back to your thought experiment. If dimensionality is simply what we perceive with the hard and software we have available to us, are our 3 or 4-dimensional realities the same? If you’re 90 degrees to my right facing me, and I’m facing forward; your 3 spatial dimensions are orthogonal to mine.
Does that mean we’re in different dimensions? Could interdimensional travel be that simple?
Now walking down the hill away from the university seeing cars, buildings, other teachers and students from all angles, you’re questioning more than the extra dimensions predicted in string theory – you’re questioning what’s ahead. If ahead even exists for you now.
MASTERING TIME, ALTERNATE FUTURES & THE 5TH AND 6TH DIMENSIONS
“Everything we call real is made up of things that cannot be regarded as real.” (Neils Bohr)
Image by StockCake
Quantum mechanics suggests the universe may not exist if you’re not looking at it. That it’s the observation that makes a specific, concrete reality appear. Addressing concepts like that, Einstein famously wrote: “The more success quantum theory has, the sillier it looks.”
What brought you into this coffee shop, though driven by your present state of enhanced perception was hardly silly. It was an intense street protest. Seething anger – kids with signs and masked agents.
Seeing that from all angles was not only weird, it was propitious. Especially for the girl you pulled away from the rubber bullets an agent fired – having watched them leave the rifle from the man’s perspective in slow motion.
And somehow calculating with the mathematical precision of a supercomputer where she needed to be – and getting her there.
Staring into your coffee on the ledge, you think back to something you pulled from your research. A claim that: “In theory, if you could master the 5th and 6th dimensions, you could travel backward in time or into different futures.”
So, you’re wondering; is that what you’ve done? Become the master of the 5th and 6th dimensions? Like a superhero?
Werner Heisenberg once said: “Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.” And he was only speaking of the strangeness of quantum mechanics – which at the time five people worldwide claimed to understand. With Richard Feynman claiming no one did.
Then something else comes to mind. Specifically, your mind – or cognitive processes anyway. Your ability to see things visually from different or all perspectives. With the possible added ability of seeing forward or back in time and maybe into different futures.
If you’ve rewired your brain and are now perceiving and processing information differently, what other abilities have you gained?
Will you soon be solving those big puzzles in physics and cosmology? Like tying quantum mechanics with gravity leading to a Grand Unified Theory? Maybe adding something new to the many multiverse theories? What else is there in your possible futures?
All this from a thought experiment. It’s fascinating, puzzling at times, and a challenge being you.
THE CUBE IN A SPHERICAL ROOM: A GIFT FOR COGNITIVE SCIENTISTS
“If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.” (William Blake)
Image by StockCake
Gustave Flaubert wrote: “There is no truth, there is only perception.” Is it possible he also put a cube inside a big glass ball hoping to explore extra dimensions? Like you, he was known for pushing boundaries, exploring the unknown, challenging the tolerance and commitment of family and friends.
It’d be rough finding that a French novelist scooped you on your new thought experiment. Especially one who’s been dead 150 years.
Having left the coffee shop heading back to the lab, you’re confused by the weirdness: how you got here – how you’re collecting and processing visual data like this. Watching someone ahead from all sides is truly unique. It’s like being in the dressing room at Macy’s with its wrap-around mirrors only unbound by architectural limitations.
And that loops you back again to your thought experiment. And the reaction you got from Regina when you laid it on her over wine and Maki rolls.
It was during your Friday sushi night out at Kiraku on Telegraph. Odd, in retrospect that she chose not to chide you or roll her eyes or make those subtly critical mouth noises. She just let you pour it out.
“Imagine a cube,” you said, “inside a spherical room with 60 cameras mounted on the walls all pointed at it – feeding to one processor – displaying it on a single monitor.” She knew not to interrupt. That there was more coming.
“Now,” you continued after an intentional pause, “from any one camera, the most you could see is three sides of that cube. But if you started adding perspectives, what image would you see?”
More of a philosopher than a scientist, she skimmed over the physics and began looking for metaphors. Like unsanctioned twisting of your experiment into human psychology 101: how we perceive ourselves within our environment. How our conscious state may emerge from perception. Drawing a parallel with Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.
But then she found the lane and threw out something you found profound… and ultimately valuable.
“Our minds didn’t evolve to process information like that. We’d see a smudge. Maybe spherical – but without definition.”
You looked at her for a long time thinking, wondering if she had it right. You imagined fish with eyes on either side, and how they evolved to process a nearly 360-degree field. Bending light with their brains interpreting bits of information regarding motion, shape and colour into a composite image – guiding and possibly warning them.
That worked. And it was nice of her to participate without the usual polite but rigorous condescension.
PUSHING THE BOUNDARIES: EXPLORING TIME AND THE MULTIVERSE
“Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure science.” (Edwin Hubble)
Image by StockCake
After that dinner, you decided you had to solve it. You’d ventured too far to let it drop. Not something that could change our understanding of our universe – open pathways to interstellar, maybe even intergalactic or multiversal space travel.
And those were just for starters.
In the morning, you called the university office, requested lab space, ordered the materials and hired three talented campus engineers.
Following your instructions and the detailed CAD layout you worked up; over the next six days, they constructed a nine-metre diameter spherical room made of laminated glass inside the basement lab of Birge Hall.
On the inner walls, they added 60 Super low lux Pinhole cameras – all wired to a desktop computer running an NVIDIA RTX 4090 GPU with a VisionTek RX 550 Graphics card. Which was plenty fast for what you needed.
You were determined to get that image of a cube from all angles. Hopefully prove those higher dimensions are there before our very eyes. And that our eyes are fully capable of perceiving them, but it’s our brains that are the laggards.
If, you thought, they could be retrained, rewired, restructured or what-have-you, we could pole vault over the need for the complicated physics and the warp drive engines and the fancy equations. We could get into those higher dimensions another way.
“Open my eyes, that I may see,” wrote Clara Scott drawing inspiration from Psalm 119:18. But, you just knew, our eyes are open – it’s just our brain’s inability to interpret correctly the data.
And with what happened this morning following the completion of the spherical room and your debut experiment, you’re suddenly calm and accepting.
And ready to boldly move to the next step.
PERCEIVING AS WE WALK: THROUGH MANY DIMENSIONS
“String theory envisions a multiverse in which our universe is one slice of bread in a big cosmic loaf.” (Brian Greene)
Image by StockCake
So, what is the interest in extra dimensions anyway? For you and for others? Is it just a quest for knowledge, or something more? Many say it’s for interdimensional travel – the theoretical movement between dimensions, parallel universes or planes of reality.
Though that sounds like science fiction, it stems from physics concepts. Specifically string theory’s nine or ten spatial dimensions and Einstein’s General Relativity. Which allows for possible shortcuts in spacetime. Wormholes also Einstein-Rosen bridges.
With the distances in interstellar and intergalactic space so vast, it makes sense science would seek an alternate, quicker route from here to there in the Andromeda galaxy. Millions of years of travel at light speed. We’re just not getting there with current or even future spec technologies.
There’s one other concept you pulled from your research that strikes you now that you’ve returned to the lab and are again staring at your magnificent sphere with its mini cameras - and that matte grey cube suspended in the centre by fused silica-glass fibres: The hypothesised types of interdimensional travel.
Physical travel. Transfer of information. Communication. And the one you’re now convinced is the most relevant to your current state: Consciousness Transfer. Moving or projecting the mind into a version of oneself in another dimension.
Just staring at that cube – no longer interested in the monitor displaying it from the 60 real-time cameras – but seeing it crisp and logical from all possible angles – and having it all make sense to your mind, you’re sure now.
Convinced you’re not who you think you are, and this world, though a close or perhaps identical twin of the one you’ve known your 42 years, is not the one you’ve known for 42 years.
And now turning away, you decide it’s time to use your powers. To travel this world and others as master of the 5th and 6th dimensions. Traversing time – preventing tragedies. Solving mysteries and rewriting physics.
Not necessarily as a superhero, maybe more of an interdimensional ambassador.
FORWARD AND BACK THE MASTER TRAVELS: LIVING AND RELIVING
“In order to more fully understand this reality, we must take into account other dimensions of a broader reality.” (John Wheeler)
Image by StockCake
Worlds are many. Time is an illusion. Reality is proprietary and changeable. You existed once in many dimensions but perceived only few. Your limitations were constructions, like scaffolds of experience. And only when you ventured outside that which you knew to be so did you find the truth.
That there are many truths - none that are universal.
It took a while for you to accept it. That you always had access to those higher dimensions. You live and have lived in 10-dimensional space and time your entire existence – which itself may be infinite.
Now walking to school, you smile and nod to the others you’ve come to know who like you travel unconstrained the multiverse, time and the dimensions beyond height, width and depth.
You know them, not by name, but by the expanded look in their eyes – watching them navigate, make decisions, turn left or turn right. Each step interdimensional travel. New coordinates – a new plane of reality.
This realm that you’ve entered has granted you insight not knowledge. There are still questions you have about gravity and light. The uncertainty of electrons and why consciousness evolves.
You spend long nights now with your thought experiments, hypothesising and scratching notes. And the most valuable thing you’ve found is humility. The awareness of how little you know of what one day you hope to know.
Mark Thomas (T. E. Mark)
StorytellingScience.org
