A Tale Of Many Sides

A boy wonders about other dimensions and the creatures that may inhabit them.

A Tale of Many Sides

Psi Twelve-Eight-Two sat staring forlornly at his desk. Upon it sat his quantum mechanics homework. He was intensely interested in the subject, but for some reason he still dragged his feet when attempting to do the work. After a few hours the numbers just all seemed to blur together, his mind feeling spongy and moist, saturated with incomprehension. 

He twirled his pencil between his fingers and tried once more to focus on the work in front of him. Part of the problem was that this all seemed so abstract. He couldn't touch it and could barely draw a picture of it, and what pictures he did draw were only themselves poor approximations and visualizations designed to help conceptualize, not actually how it all worked. 

After half-heartedly writing the number of the next problem and turning to the appropriate page in his text, he decided he deserved a break for all his hard work. Psi Twelve-Eight-Two (or Psitet as his friends called him) leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. Feeling the warm breeze from his open window, he began to daydream about a concept which had tickled him for a few days now. 

A friend had mentioned that it may be possible for there to be multi-dimensional beings, and probably even trans-dimensional beings, creatures which thought and acted in higher or lower dimensions and those that could even move between dimensions as easily as he would walk across a room.

Psitet suddenly imagined compressing himself down and walking around his homework, his features squashed and flat, becoming only a cross-section of himself. What could it possibly be like? Everything he knew about physics said it should be impossible for such a creature to think or move. A brain simply couldn't work in a lower dimension, and neither could legs or arms or any other means of transportation. 

What would such a world look like? But he supposed even that question was meaningless when you were talking about a lower dimension. The idea of "seeing" was dependent on dimensionality. The physics of sight just wouldn't work in a lower dimension. 

But observation transcended dimensions. That was one of the points of quantum mechanics. He'd actually caught that bit. So if, say, a lower dimensional being were somehow able to fully observe a higher dimensional event, the wave function would collapse, fixing it for all dimensions. 

Psitet began to get dizzy. Thinking about how observation between dimensions would work was making his head hurt. He opened his eyes and stood up stretching, stifling a yawn.

He sat back down, but wasn't quite ready to start his work yet. Okay, so what about higher dimensions? If he imagined that each dimension is really just a cross-section of a higher dimension, it followed that the next higher dimension would be the projection of his own, rotated or extruded into a higher dimension. 

But he still had no idea what that would look like. Psitet thought about how they visualized an extra dimension for graphs in the lab. You had all your normal axes, but then you introduced color representing another dimension, like heat maps containing certain information. In the next higher dimension this color data would just be shown on another axis, one of that dimension's normal axes. 

He imagined the beings which inhabited such high dimensions would be equally stumped as to how to imagine yet another higher dimension. But that thought brought him back to what such creatures would really be like? Could they even be called creatures or beings? Their very existence surpassed his understanding, his brain being limited by its dimension. 

Then Psitet realized that if there really were creatures of higher dimensions, maybe they were just as stumped as he was about how lower dimensional creatures would work. A small smile played across his lips as he imagined a godlike being trying as futilely as he was to figure out how a lower dimensional being like himself would think or act. But he quickly discounted this idea. If there were beings in higher or lower dimensions, they would certainly be vastly different. So different as to be utterly incomprehensible.

Psi shook his head. Okay, he'd done enough daydreaming, it was time to get down to work. He looked at the next problem. Oh shoot, he thought, I have to derive the Timoth Equation in all lower dimensions. At least the first few are trivial, but it's such a pain once I get past the first six. Too bad I'm an 8-dimensional being; otherwise, this would be a breeze. Those seven dimensional jerks must have it easy. He chuckled at this thought, putting his pencil down to the page and beginning to scribble. Soon he was lost in the complex math of multiple dimensions.

Author's Note

Not so much a story as an entertaining musing of mine. Might turn it into a story though. Feel free to message/comment with questions, I know it's kinda "mathy".