Hyperspace

What about hyperspace? A common device used in science fiction and science fantasy depends upon the existence of an alternate realm where space is "denser" and the speed of light is not a speed limit, or perhaps there is no speed limit at all--hyperspace. A spacecraft enters hyperspace through its own or by external means (by using a jump gate versus a jump point in Babylon 5 terminology), it travels rapidly to the destination, and reenters "normal" space. Such a dimension has been called hyperspace (Babylon 5, Star Wars, and others), subspace (Star Trek, though the plot device is used for superluminal communications only), or slipspace (Star Trek: Voyager, Andromeda, Doctor Who, and the Halo series of video games). When the concept of hyperspatial travel initially appeared in 1930s science fiction, there was no corresponding science to explain it. It was a dramatic conceit. Comparatively recent models of the structure of our universe may provide a dramatically satisfying post hoc explanation for hyperspace.

The notion that there may be parallel universes coexisting simultaneously has been a frequently used devise in science fiction, though the concept of multiple universes and/or multiple realities goes back much further and can be found in ancient Hindu writings. Parallel universes have been generally depicted two different ways in science fiction. In one case, a parallel universe is a universe that is almost exactly like ours, but where some small deviations in history have propagated to create dramatic differences. In other cases a parallel universe is a distinct universe that exists adjoining to our own--like E Space and N Space in Doctor Who, or fluidic space in Star Trek: Voyager. Hyperspace relies on the second type.

Recent advances in superstring theory, specifically a concept called brane cosmology, hint at the existence of hyperspace. The fundamental premise of brane cosmology is that our four-dimensional space-time may be one of many (normally) disconnected universes separated by some sort of membrane, or "brane." In other words, our four-dimensional universe is one of many that coexist simultaneously within a five-dimensional space known as the Bulk. Scientists have proposed cosmological brane models that suggest that interactions with neighboring branes may explain the weakness of gravity (compared to other fundamental forces). One scenario, called the ekpyrotic universe, is based upon the hypothesis that our observable universe came into being when two branes collided. Together, all the parallel universes along with the Bulk form what has been called the multiverse.

Think of the multiverse as a huge apartment/condo/co-op building. Our own universe, and every other universe, would be like individual apartments in that larger structure. Suppose we live in universe 4D and we want to go from the bedroom into the kitchen. The house physics rules for our particular unit say we can't travel any faster than the speed of light within our universe. But there's nothing saying that we can't go outside the apartment--into the empty hallway between the universes, where the speed limit would not apply--and get to the kitchen that way. The Bulk--the empty hallway between universes--just represents a region through which we may be able to travel. It fits the concept of hyperspace.

Of course, there are no guarantees that the rules of the Bulk would allow faster-than-light travel. But we do now suspect that there is a realm that has some of the properties that we attribute to hyperspace--outside our own universe, difficult (or impossible) to access, with different rules and limits. For a science fiction writer, taking a plausible but hazy scientific concept and giving it the attributes you need for your story is vastly preferable to just making up something like "hyperspace."

Strukturen der physikalischen Welt und
ihrer nichtmateriellen Seite

Band 3

KAPITEL II
HYPERRAUMDYNAMIK
1. Projektionen in Zeit und Raum 27
2. Symmetrien des kosmogonischen Ursprungs 30
3. Kosmogonie der Elemente eines Subuniversums 43
4. Hyperraumdynamik und indeterministische Quantentheorie 47

(55) Ouspensky’s Tertium Organum was perhaps the single most effective counterblast to the reigning intellectual orthodoxy of the early twentieth century. A précis of the book is nearly impossible, as the ground covered includes Kantian epistemology, Hinton’s cubes, animal perception, sex, Theosophy, cosmic consciousness, the superman, and Ouspensky’s own experiences of mystical states. With its English translation as “The Third Organ of Thought”—set to supercede those of Aristotle and Francis Bacon—Tertium Organum argues for the need to move beyond logic and rationality in order to grasp the true nature of reality.

(56) Ouspensky believes that perceiving things in higher space will lead us to thinking about them in a different way, to “thinking in other categories”—to new concepts and new analogies and a new language with which to speak about reality. As he knew from his experiments with half-dream states and with drugs, this is what is most essential.

(56-57) Subtitled “A Key to the Enigmas of the World,” Tertium Organum is rightly seen as a classic of higher space and higher mathematics…. Ouspensky’s starting point is his intuition that positivism, the intellectual orthodoxy of his day, was woefully inadequate to account for the most important aspects of human existence. That orthodoxy…states that what is real can be measured, through our own sensory organs or through the many extensions of those developed by science. Only that which is visible is real.

(57) Tertium Organum did more than develop Hinton’s and others’ ideas about a fourth dimension. Ouspensky’s aim is to convince us that there is good evidence for the existence of the “invisibles” science regards as nonexistent. In fact, he tells us that they are even more real than the material reality that science tells us explains them away. Since the time of William Blake, who cleansed the doors of perception and saw a world in a grain of sand, poets have made this same point in different ways—the Romantics, as well as the Symbolists of Ouspensky’s generation. What Ouspensky did was to make the argument philosophically strong.

(58 ) [C]onfining Ouspensky to the niche of hyperspace philosopher ignores a good half—maybe more—of his argument. What draws Ouspensky on in Tertium Organum is the notion of the miraculous, the sense that an entire other world exists that we participate in yet are unaware of. Geometric analogies are useful to Ouspensky because they help us arrive through reason at an insight that transcends reason, or at least transcends the artificial limits set by positivism.

(59) This poetical understanding of things needs to be developed, Ouspensky tells us, because only through it do we come in contact with the real world. Art is a means of doing this, because all art is concerned with representing the “differences” that positivist thought, in its focus on the purely measurable, denies. “At our present stage of development we possess no other means for the perception of the world of causes, which is as powerful as the one contained in art.” … He must also be a magician and make others see what they would otherwise ignore.

(59) The artist helps us see the differences between things that elude the measuring devices of science. He reminds us that we have our own innate means of “measuring” the meaning of things, our emotions.

(60) One means of harnessing the power of emotions is morality, which is really a form of aesthetics…. Through morality fed by our awareness of the invisible world we can unify our life, and no longer think one thing but do another….

(60) I highlight these aspects of Tertium Organum because it is too easy to forget that even with his excursions into higher mathematics Ouspensky was still a poet and romantic. His remarks about nature, sex, and love could easily have been made by Ivan Osokin, as could his comments on the function of art and poetry. And although Ouspensky believed he had gained few definite results from his nitrous oxide experiments, his glimpses of higher consciousness and his brief forays into the unknown had clearly provided him with an inner compass and a powerful sense of direction. Higher consciousness, the fourth dimension, the unknown were aspects of reality available to a new type of person that Ouspensky, in keeping with the terminology of his time, thought of as the superman. It was towards the superman that he was slowly moving.

(130) The idea in fiction of the fourth dimension as a space dimension, although its history stretches well back into the nineteenth century, is itself predated by /// much academic speculation and commentary. Aristotle, writing in 350 B.C., declared in his essay “On the Heavens” that “the three dimensions are all that there are.” And that was just the beginning observation, leading up to a virtual explosion of activity over twenty-one hundred years later, in the nineteenth century. Indeed, one scholar on the history of hyperspace, Bork (1964), found that by 1911 there were at least 1800 papers on n-dimensional geometry, three-fourths of them written before 1900.

(131) In 1873, for example, we find an essay in Nature that refers to well-known mathematicians who even earlier had shown that they had an inner assurance of the reality of transcendental space. Just five years later the eminent mathematical physicist Peter Tait, in a comment tossed out in casual passing, tells us that “Prof. Klein, of Munich, some time ago showed, as is well known [my emphasis], that knots cannot exist in four dimensions.” Tait went on to indicate the basis, for some, for believing in a fourth spatial dimension; it offered one way to explain otherwise inexplicable occurrences, such as ghosts, the reading of sealed letters, and rope tricks

(131) The American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) was an early advocate for the four-dimensionality of space. Just what Peirce thought the nature of the fourth dimension to [e] is somewhat unclear, but the context suggests that he took it to be spatial. He thought three-dimensional space to be “perverse” because of the existence of incongruous counterparts (such as left- and right-handed gloves), and this was apparently strong evidence for him that space could not be three-dimensional.

(87-8 Tait and Stewart’s late-classical effort to fit thermodynamic mechanisms within Christian revelation seems to have done little for the prestige of institutional religion. Ironically, however, it gave considerable impetus to alternative spiritual systems. By ostensibly marshalling scientific credence for the divine dispensation of immaterial energies, this work strongly abetted the mythopoetic fervor of the late-Victorian and early-modernist eras. The cultural wake of the allegory of thermodynamics codified in the Unseen Universe impelled a series of scientistic doctrines that lapped upon D. H. Lawrence’s shores, from the Theosophy of Madame Blavatsky and Annie Besant, to the monist energetics of Ernst Haeckel and Wilhelm Ostwald, to the hyperspace philosophies of the fourth dimension initiated by Charles Howard Hinton in the 1880s and later disseminated to Lawrence by the English translation of Ouspensky’s Tertium Organum.

(104-105) The fourth dimension was a recurring theme throughout Fuller’s career. As with his other concepts of nature, Fuller’s understanding changed over time, oscillating between—and sometimes combining—differing concepts of the fourth dimension as space and as time. This ambivalence as to whether the fourth dimension was spatial or temporal reflected his familiarity with two disparate concepts of the fourth dimension. The concept of the fourth dimension of space had gained prominence following the 1868 publication of G. B. F. Riemann’s theory of n-dimensional space. By demonstrating mathematically that space could possess a variable and potentially infinite number of dimensions, Riemann suggested that the universe might contain spaces of more than three dimensions. After World War I the new concept of the fourth dimension as time, formulated by mathematician Hermann Minkowski in 1907 and incorporated into Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, eclipsed the idea of higher spatial dimensions.

(105-106) For a half century after its publication, Riemann’s work inspired speculation as to the potential reality of higher-dimensional spaces, including a large parascientific literature that posited a fourth spatial dimension as the explanation for occult phenomena and mystical experiences. In the new genre of “hyperspace philosophy” Riemann’s discovery became a vehicle for social critiques and religious convictions, ranging from the social commentary of E. A. Abbott’s satire Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884) to the mystical doctrines of theosophy, the “spiritual science” that sought to reconcile modern Western science with ancient Eastern religious principles from the Bhagavad-Gita and the Upanishads. According to most hyperspace theories, the fourth dimension was a real space beyond the range of normal human perception, awareness of which had existential, epistemological, and ethical consequences. In the late 1870s, for instance, Leipzig physicist and astronomer J. C. F. Zöllner developed a theory of “transcendental physics” that explained spiritualist phenomena, such as clairvoyance and the materializing of objects within sealed enclosures, as fourth-dimensional phenomena. From the early 1880s to his death in 1904, English mathematician Charles Howard Hinton made the principle of a four-dimensional intelligence looking down into an exposed third dimension the basis of an altruistic ethical code. Hinton encouraged his readers to cultivate four-dimensional vision so that they might “cast out the self” and achieve transcendent unity with higher-dimensional cosmic being. In Russia, P. D. Ouspensky’s Tertium Organum (1911) drew on Zöllner, Hinton, and other sources to develop a mystical cosmology characterizing the evolution of consciousness as a conquest of successively higher spatial dimensions. In Rochester, New York, meanwhile, Claude Bragdon synthesized ideas from Hinton and other hyperspace sources in articles and books that identified the fourth dimension as the future home of perfected humanity. By overcoming their materialism and transcending their egotism, Bragdon argued, individuals could gain access to four-dimensional New Jerusalem where millennial dreams of abundance and harmony would be fulfilled. Bragdon disseminated these ideas in his books Man the Square (1912), A Primer of Higher Space (1913), and Four-Dimensional Vistas (1916). When he translated and published Tertium Organum in 1920, Bragdon also introduced Ouspensky’s four-dimensional cosmology to English-speaking audiences, who devoured the book in new editions issued almost annually.

(87) From the late nineteenth century, talk of a fourth dimension had been much in vogue in avant-garde and spiritualist circles. “Hyperspace philosophy,” as fourth-dimension concepts were often designated, professed that the ultimate way to defeat the evils of positivism and materialism was “for man to develop his powers of intuition in order to perceive the fourth dimension of the world, the true reality.” Fourth dimensionality or hyperspace goes back very possibly to Pythagoras and has appeared in various guises throughout much of recorded history. In seventeenth-century England, for example, Henry More, “the most mystical of an obscure group of philosophers known as the Cambridge Platonists,” proposed the fourth dimension as the realm of Platonic ideals. It was not anything altogether new, then, when allusions to a fourth dimension began to circulate with some regularity at the turn of the twentieth century.

(87-88 ) The three-dimensional world, according to Ouspensky, did not exist in reality but was merely a creation of mankind’s imperfect senses: “The three-dimensional world—this is the four-dimensional world observed through the narrow slits of our senses. Therefore all magnitudes which we regard as such in the three-dimensional world are not real magnitudes, but merely artificially assumed.” … By developing “cosmic consciousness,” the source of the sensation of infinity, mystics could begin to live in a fourth dimension.