Monday, December 15, 2014

Interstellar #3 - Time and Gravity as physical dimensions

Here's the second one.


It's difficult (but not impossible) to understand time (or gravity) as a physical dimension, since they're both invisible to our naked eyes and we don't pay much attention to these entities in our daily life. We have 3 physical dimensions that we perceive: length, width and height and 1 invisible dimension "TIME". Let's consider another invisible but a more closer entity around us, AIR. Even though we don't pay much attention to it we know air is always around us. Now let's say we make air visible, let's give air the visibility of water (water is colorless but visible to our naked eyes) what if the air around us is visible to us and it looks and feels like water. By maneuvering our hands through air we can create shapes in it. Make a ball of air and hurl is towards another person, and since air is not affected by gravity this ball will travel through space till it hits another object or encounters another force.

We know that music travels using air as a medium. If air is a visible entity like we discussed then we will be able to see music while its travelling through air. And if, say, we want to share a piece of music we heard, to our friend, we can ball up the music we see in the air around us and flick it over to our friend. He can catch the ball and hence (theoretically) would receive the piece of music we want him to hear. Well all this was simple, but how do you replace time with air from the above example. for that we need to understand time.

Time is divided into three, past, present and future. Now here it gets real tricky. In the movie when cooper travels through the worm hole and finally ends up in Gargantua it's his present time, but inside Gargantua, time is a 4th physical (hence visible) dimension so his past (when Murph was a little girl), his present (floating inside Gargantua) and his "relative to earth" future (Murph has grown up and is as old as her father) are all visible at the same time.

Inside the Gargantua he's said to have reached the singularity. At the point of singularity time cannot exist as we observe from earth. Everything we have experienced with respect to time is present at the same time. On earth time flows only in one direction, but once inside a singularity time does not flow from something or towards anything. It's just present, just like any object which is placed in space will have a height, length and width (3-D). I can imagine Chris asking Kip to explain him how time would appear if viewed as a physical entity, the answer could've been "its present". Everything is present, your past, your future, right from the second you were born to the second you died, everything is present at the same time as physical, observable entities.

Cooper sends a Morse code ("STAY") through one of his physical dimension, gravity, from Gargantua but to an observer (Murph and past cooper) on earth (where there are only 3 visible dimensions) the signal is, first of all received with immense time gap between two alphabets and second of all bent through space-time and appears in 3-D, a book falls from the shelf.
the second signal, with dust and gravity (binary code) is also sent through the same 5th dimension of gravity from Gargantua. Cooper is able to see his past (all his pasts in different views arranged in a grid, like books in a library) right in front of his eyes so he knew that the dust storm would take place in one of grids and he searches and finds it. In this scene we can actually see the 5th dimension of gravity as a visible physical dimension. Now he can modify his physical dimension gravity on Gargantua, just like arranging books in rows and for the observers from earth (3-D) it appears as though the dust is settling itself in columns. The places where the dust failed to settle have less gravity than the ones where dust has formed a column on the ground. This change in gravity pattern is caused by cooper with 5 dimensions, from Gargantua, through time, across space and on earth to be observed in 3 dimensions.


Now for the 3rd signal. the second hand of the Hamilton automatic watch ticks for each second. from earth (where time is invisible) we can see the watch tick once every second but to Cooper, on Gargantua, since time is a 4th physical dimension, he can observe the seconds, which causes the ticking of the watch, as a physical entity through his eyes. Now he reaches out into space and gently plucks these seconds (like you would pluck a guitar or a harp) and on earth the second hand ticks in Morse code for Murph to see.

Okay so we've talked about the visible dimensions inside Gargantua, what about the invisible ones. Time and gravity, which are invisible on earth, are visible inside Gargantua, so, there must also be one or two invisible dimensions. What is that thing that tells Cooper that Murph would understand his signals? Has "Love" been portrayed as the invisible dimension inside the Tesseract?

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