It's about time for Hypertime

We often learn of hyperspace in books, TV shows, movies like Star Wars, and in the psychedelic literature of Terrene Mckenna who often talked about escaping history and entering hyperspace. So what Terrence was really saying was that this hyperspace was hypertime as well. I first heard the term of hyperspace from the orginal Star Wars when I was a kid, then within a scientific framework some 20 years ago. In all that time I always wondered about the possibility of hypertime, and what the implications of it were. When you think of the concept its even more bizarre and interesting that hyperspace. As part of my own psychedelic voyages, I've had several expereinces of hypertime, existing simultaneously in both eternity and what appeared to be endless dimensions of time and possibility completely indpendent of our own. On a couple of occasions, when I returned to baseline, I had no idea if an hour or a year had passed in my absence from consensus reality.

So what is hypertime and how would it work? All contemporary physical theories treat time and space as one thing - spacetime. At the so-called beginning of our local universe, spacetime was created in the first instances of the big bang, expanding outward, resulting in at least 3 macroscopic dimensions of space, and one of time. According to the latest Grand Unified Theories (GUT's), there are probably another 7 dimensions of space wrapped up in extremely convoluted shapes at extremely small scales. These types of GUT's seem to change and evolve weekly, so no one is really sure what an accurate theory would be of our local universe. One of the nifty things that have come out of all these theories is the increasing likelihood of an endless number of other universes representing every mathematical property and variation. Our universe being an arbitrary one among an infinite number of possibilities. Concepts like space and time, which to us seem innate to existence, are probably entirely foreign concepts to intelligences living in these other exotic universes.

Buts lets just stick with universes similar to ours - ones with 3 dimensions of space and one of time. Most people automatically assume that these other universes are operating and moving along at the same speed as ours. This is the intuitive way of looking at it. When we hear tales of other universes, we think that they are going about their business just like ours... a day passes here, and a day passes there. But how could this even be? Our timeline is completely and internally self-consistent only within our universe. All those other universes with their own timelines should be operating completely orthogonal to our timeline. In other words, each of these timelines of these other universes are all operating within their own independent dimension of time. If there was a way that we could go from one universe to another, this would also imply that we could hop into these others universes at arbitrary points in their timelines. If for example, large rotating black holes, such as the one in the center of our galaxy were gateways to other universes, for all intents and purposes these gateways would take us to an arbitrary point in their universe. And if we traveled around one of these universes and found another black hole back to our universe, the chances are extremely likely that we would end up in an entirely different point in our timeline, possibly billions of years in the past or future.

If an artificial means were ever found to leave our space-time continuum then there is no reason to think that we couldn't travel to other space-time’s, spend thousands of years in these timelines, then come back to ours at the exact moment we left. This would be equivalent to traveling at 90-degree angles to our timeline.

So how many dimensions of time exist in this super-set of all possible universes? Probably as many dimensions as there are universes with time as a property. Same goes for space as well. In other words, true hyper-space-time consists of an infinite number of space and time dimensions.

Posted by paul at July 25, 2004 04:08 PM | TrackBack