How many Dimensions?

14 March 2010

String theory adds up to six dimensions to our usual set of three giving room for theoretical physicists and science fictionists alike to speculate about parallel universes which might be folded into our known one like Russian dolls or less convincingly, might coexist outside ours.
We humans don’t usually need quantum scales in our daily life, we nevertheless live in several universes and times at the same moment without all too much thought. I was reminded of this today when I observed Liam and Nina interact, the mother infant universe with a sun and a planet, a complete system the child revolving around the mother, in a stable attraction and on a fairly predictable trajectory, and the mother giving all the warmth and love as well as the gravitas to keep it that way. Concurrent I saw the parallel universe of Nina in Liam’s age with her mother, whom Nina resembles strikingly. Although Liam is quite the boy his demeanor and charme remind me a lot of his mother’s as an infant and when I hold Liam echoes from Nina’s past reverberate through my senses and memories.
Fainter and still discernible are weak reverberations of my own past as a child, the time when my mother was my sun and my life rotated around her. She, still alive and Liams’ great grandmother, now in the late chapter of her life, her own warmth diminishing and she herself in need of the glow of her offspring.
These three universes were all real at the same time just as the big bang is still around in the form of background radiation. We process all these dimensions, times and layers usually flawlessly and in split-seconds. No hourglass shows up on our retina to show overload, if the vibrations get too strong we feel saturated with feeling, sentiment, sorrow, hope and inspiration. This makes us superior to computers and, in spite of our size our brain might match the complexity of the electrons, quarks and gluons, their uncertainties and jitters and quantum entanglements.
Liam can safely sleep in his mother’s orbit on 72nd Street in Manhattan but he also is still here, I encounter his sounds, his expressions and his words at all the places he had just filled with his joy and it is as if they were still warm from the vibrations of life. Nothing better represents life than the young child expressing, exploring and discovering it. Nine dimensions might not even be enough to describe it all.