So far, the physicists have not actually proven that there are more than the three dimensions of space and one of time. They desperately hope that the new Large Hadron Collider which is about to start up at CERN in Geneva will generate some particles that will go through the looking-glass into one or more of these other dimensions. String theory and other calculations predict that these other dimensions exist, however ultramicroscopic they might be. Next year, we might know for sure. Science can prove things! Philosophy or art cannot.

In the entry previous to this one, I described the passage of my Orangemobile through the Appalachian mountains as a journey through three dimensions of vectors. But that is not by any means the whole story of the motion of my car. That only describes its motion on planet Earth. Let us consider the Honda Element as an Element-ary particle. I proved in my posting of 4 December 2006 that the Orangemobile is not a positron. It may be a meson of some kind, but I am not about to smash it into something else to find out. The Honda particle is traveling in its own local set of vectors, but so is planet Earth.

Not only is Earth rotating on its axis, but it is on its way around the sun in its yearly orbit. In turn, the Sun, its attendant solar system and its population of car parts (asteroids and comets) is part of a great rotating disc which is the "Milky Way" (or Galactic Beltway) galaxy. At this point I don't know whether the disc of our Solar System is parallel to the disc of the Milky Way or whether it is at an angle to it. This would make quite a difference in how the Earth travels along its route.

The path of the Earth as it follows the Sun along its Galactic commute would form some sort of helix, which rotates around another path, which is taken by the whole Solar System as it moves around the galaxy. But there is yet another source of motion there, which is the motion of the Galaxy itself as it proceeds down the Intergalactic Interstate towards its neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy. Astronomers promise us that within a few billion years, if the Milky Way doesn't drive carefully, it will smash into Andromeda and probably cause a major backup on that crowded highway.

By this time there is no way to truly plot all the vectors and forces which apply to our Earth in space. We seem to be moving in a modern version of the ancient astronomy of cycles and epicycles, not to mention the added factor of relativistic distortions of space and time which make a perfectly accurate plotting of our path impossible, no matter how many cosmic GPS devices we employ.

Posted at 4:10 am | link