{"id":821,"date":"2004-05-16T15:49:00","date_gmt":"2004-05-16T15:49:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/2004\/05\/16\/821\/"},"modified":"2004-05-16T15:49:00","modified_gmt":"2004-05-16T15:49:00","slug":"821","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=821","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

SPIN CYCLE: I\u2019m slowly going through my \u201cGreat Minds of the Western World\u201d CD lectures from The Teaching Company. I\u2019ve made it to the 17th Century, and just heard the story of Sir Isaac Newton<\/strong>. The great minds of the 16th and 17th Centuries were quite amazing, and Sir Isaac was the amazing of the amazing. In just a few months, mostly as a spare time project, Newton thought up the basic concepts and math for what we now call \u201cphysics\u201d. And after he finished it, he stuffed his notes in a drawer and forgot about them until 20 years later, when astronomer Halley paid him a visit to discuss the motion of planets. Newton suddenly remembered that he had previously sketched out some math, but he wasn\u2019t sure just where those notes were anymore. Luckily, he eventually found them and published them, and the world took a huge step out of the dark mists of ignorance and misunderstanding (i.e., a world where things moved according to \u201cmagic\u201d). <\/p>\n

Yea, you\u2019ve gotta have a pretty big mind to put together the idea of \u201cforce equals mass times acceleration\u201d and \u201cmomentum equals mass times velocity\u201d and \u201cthe force of gravity is inversely proportionate to the square of the distance between two objects\u201d. Put all that together with the recently invented Cartesian 3-dimensional coordinate grid, as Newton did, and you could relate force and mass and time and motion in one neat little package. Quite a useful thing, as it turned out. (Unfortunately, as always, the military was one of the first groups to see the value of this new idea; using Newton\u2019s system, they could figure out with great accuracy where a cannon ball<\/strong> or an artillery shell<\/strong> would land).<\/p>\n

Well, I don\u2019t have a mind anywhere near as big as Newton\u2019s, nor do I remember much about the math behind basic physics, despite having studied it in engineering school many years ago. But I was tempted to do a bit of ersatz \u201cbig thinking\u201d myself after watching Brian Greene\u2019s PBS special about superstring theory, \u201cThe Elegant Universe\u201d<\/strong>. I was intrigued by the simple exposition of hidden dimensions that Greene presented — recall that one of superstring\u2019s biggest conceptual challenges is its need for 10 or 11 dimensions, well beyond the 3 space dimensions and one time dimension that we perceive in our daily life. <\/p>\n

Greene said that as far as we are concerned here in our day-to-day world, the extra dimensions of superstring are rolled up into tiny little balls, and thus they can\u2019t take us anywhere relative to our three dimensions. He made an analogy to a long wire cable. You could step back and look at a long, straight piece of cable, and it looks like something that has only has only one dimension, i.e. length. However, if you zoom in on the cable, down to the perspective of an ant<\/strong>, it has two \u201cdegrees of freedom\u201d: length, given that the ant can walk along the cable; but also, the cable has a circular dimension \u2026 the ant can walk in circles around the cable. That ant would hardly get anywhere if it just keeps on spinning round and round the cable; the circular dimension isn\u2019t doing it much good, just as the hidden dimensions of superstring theory don\u2019t allow us to do any hyper-dimensional transporting. (Hyper dimensional transporting<\/strong> would be really cool \u2026 if there were to be a linear hyper-dimension, you could disappear and show up a few seconds later in an entirely different place; imagine the fun you could have \u2026 here I am, now I\u2019m on the other side of the room, now I\u2019m across the street, now I\u2019m back again, where will I show up next?). <\/p>\n

Greene then said not to take this example too literally \u2026 it\u2019s a \u201csort of\u201d analogy, because the concepts behind superstring are much weirder and harder to understand. Well, doing some Newtonian big-think, but on a more literal basis (well below the level of superstring mathematics, which I\u2019ll never come close to understanding, and not even up to Einsteinian relativity), it occurred to me that you might be able to come up with a different way of looking at day-to-day physical matter and movement. I wondered if Newton could have decided that there are six dimensions<\/strong> by which we should describe the movements in time and space of all matter. The first three are the highly apparent ones: length, width and depth. The extra three are circular dimensions that are wrapped around the big three linear dimensions, just as in Greene\u2019s example of the ants walking around the cable. The first three dimensions are used to describe an object\u2019s relative position and its linear movement. The next three couldn\u2019t tell you a thing about an object\u2019s position or linear movement, but they could tell you what it\u2019s doing with regard to spin<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

When you think about it, spin is a strange thing (I\u2019m talking about regular spin, not the totally abstract and weird concept of \u201cspin\u201d for elementary particles \u2026 or the totally down-to-earth and weird concept of political spin<\/strong>). You airplane pilots are very familiar with spin; you call it roll, pitch and yaw. When you\u2019re up there in the clouds, either on a Piper Cub or a jumbo jet, roll, pitch, and yaw are life-and-death issues for you. But for us non-pilots, well \u2026 try thinking about a spinning top (that is, if anyone still spins tops, like I did when I was a kid; one year it was yo-yos, the next year it was tops \u2026 I guess today it\u2019s skateboards). A spinning top definitely has some interesting characteristics, all of which can be adequately described in three-dimensional space through Physics 101 concepts like \u201cangular momentum\u201d and \u201ccenter of gravity\u201d and \u201cmoment arms\u201d. But still, back when I was studying basic physics, these concepts seemed like some sort of \u201cretro-fit\u201d to make a distinctive type of physical behavior (i.e., spin) comprehensible to our three dimensional system. So why couldn\u2019t our physics have been based on six dimensions instead (plus time as the seventh), to better accommodate the reality of spin? <\/p>\n

My mind is too old and weak to come up with what the math would have looked like in such a system. But I can take a guess here \u2026 it would describe every point on a grid based on it\u2019s length, width and height relative to the starting point, then would also describe what that point was doing with regard to spin along the length, width and height axes (i.e., roll, pitch and yaw). Of course, those extra three descriptions would get pretty complex; when an object is spinning along an axis, one set of points in it is experiencing \u201ctrue spin\u201d, like the stillpoint<\/strong> center of a spinning wheel. The other points of a spinning body are flying around through length, width and height according to their radial distance and angle relative to that stillpoint axis. I\u2019m not sure if all this would be a better way to describe a spinning object than the way that our 3D basic physics works. It might have been much more convoluted. But still, I wonder if it could have worked, if we could have gotten used to it, had spin been personally judged as something distinctive by the person who founded physics (i.e., Newton)? <\/p>\n

Well, there isn\u2019t any practical value in my ponderings here. None whatsoever. But nevertheless, it\u2019s fun (for me anyway) to put one\u2019s self in Newton\u2019s shoes, and see what other approaches he might have taken to describing how things work in our \u201cregular world\u201d. Things are the way that they are for historical reasons, but it\u2019s interesting to ponder whether they could have been different. Not necessarily for better, not necessarily for worse \u2026 but different! Who knows, maybe someday we will make contact with an extra-terrestrial life form<\/strong>, and maybe their basic physics will use three linear dimensions, three
\nspin dimensions, and one time dimension (just as their number systems may not be based on multiples of ten, as ours is). But then again, they may be so advanced that our theoretical 11 \u201csuperstring\u201d dimensions will be accepted doctrine to them. Or maybe they will be up to 47 dimensions or some crazy number \u2026 who knows!!!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

SPIN CYCLE: I\u2019m slowly going through my \u201cGreat Minds of the Western World\u201d CD lectures from The Teaching Company. I\u2019ve made it to the 17th Century, and just heard the story of Sir Isaac Newton. The great minds of the 16th and 17th Centuries were quite amazing, and Sir Isaac was the amazing of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/821"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=821"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/821\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=821"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=821"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=821"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}