Chethana Janith, Jadetimes Staff
C. Janith is a Jadetimes news reporter covering science and geopolitics.
When we think creatively or have “Eureka” moments, we may actually unlock access to a dimension outside of our everyday perception, according to the controversial theory.
You’re living in a three-dimensional world. We all are. You can go left, right, forward, backward, up, and down. Now, picture a being that can pop in and out of your reality as if pressing a button, like the most brilliant master of illusions. Untethered from the physical limitations of our world, this entity can now travel instantly across vast distances in space. Whether you think of it as a type of “soul” or a “spiritual entity,” this being has unlocked hidden dimensions that some believe lie beyond our perception.
But what if you were similarly connected to these higher dimensions? What if another word for the otherworldly being in question were “consciousness”, including your very own?
Despite centuries of scientific study, the nature of consciousness remains a mystery. Theories to explain the phenomenon abound, ranging from neural networks in the brain to complex algorithms of cognition, but none have definitively captured its essence. Michael Pravica, Ph.D., a professor of physics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, believes that we should be looking at hidden dimensions to explain consciousness. In his view, consciousness has the ability to transcend the physical world in moments of heightened awareness. His concept ties into the theory of hyperdimensionality, or the idea that our universe is not just made up of the three dimensions we perceive. Instead, the universe might actually be part of a much larger nexus with hidden dimensions, Pravica suggests.
If this controversial theory turns out to be true, we would have to accept not only that some beings may be residing outside the physical realm, free from the limitations of space and time, but also that our consciousness might have a similar capacity, Pravica claims.
An Orthodox Christian with a Ph.D. from Harvard, Pravica has found hyperdimensionality to be a unique way of bridging his scientific background with his religious beliefs. For this, he is on the fringes of traditional scientific thinking, taking more widely accepted ideas to extremes as a way to think about complex topics. Pravica believes hyperdimensionality is a much more familiar concept than we think. For example, he claims Jesus could be a hyperdimensional being—and not the only one. “According to the Bible, Jesus ascended into heaven 40 days after being on Earth. How do you ascend into heaven if you’re a four-dimensional creature?” Pravica asks. But, if you’re hyperdimensional, it’s very easy to travel from our familiar world into heaven, which could be a world of higher or infinite dimensions, he says.
Pravica suggests that we all might have the potential to interface with higher dimensions when we engage our brain in certain ways, like while creating art, practicing science, pondering big philosophical questions, or traveling to all sorts of far-flung places in our dreams. In those moments, our consciousness breaches the veil of the physical world and syncs with higher dimensions, which in return flood it with currents of creativity, Pravica claims. “The sheer fact that we can conceive of higher dimensions than four within our mind, within our mathematics, is a gift ... it’s something that transcends biology,” he says.
This idea of consciousness interacting with higher dimensions ties into some of the most advanced theories in physics, like string theory. It says that everything in the universe, from the smallest particles to the forces that bind them - is made of tiny, vibrating strings. The vibrations of these strings in multiple, unseen dimensions gives rise to all the different particles and forces we observe. “String theory is essentially a theory of hyperdimensionality,” says Pravica. “It’s looking at how the universe is put together on a sub-quantum scale.”
Hyperdimensionality may also help explain the curvature of spacetime, how space and time warp around massive objects like stars or planets and cause gravity. “If spacetime is not flat and it’s curved, then one could possibly argue that this curvature somehow comes from a higher dimension,” Pravica says.
While physicists commonly accept these theories about higher dimensions, not everyone agrees with Pravica’s ideas relating hyperdimensionality to consciousness. They might even be considered heretical within the scientific community, or a reductio ad absurdum, a Latin logic argument meaning “reduction to absurdity.”
Pravica’s view implies a “God of the gaps” theological perspective, “where gaps in scientific knowledge are attributed to divine intervention, rather than being seen as opportunities for further inquiry and understanding,” says Stephen Holler, Ph.D., an associate professor of physics at Fordham University in New York. “It’s a poor explanation mechanism that arguably stifles the inquisitive nature required for good science and teaches that it’s not okay to say, ‘I don’t know,’” Holler says. Admitting to ignorance about something is an opportunity, not the end. You also need to account for the trade-offs involved in disregarding reality.
The way science fills in our knowledge gaps is apparent in the way people eventually figured out how our solar system works, says Holler. At one time, people used to rely on the geocentric model to explain the world, an ancient belief that Earth is at the center of the universe. In the struggle to form an observational model out of this idea, astronomers turned to the epicycle, a model that adds small circular orbits (epicycles) on top of their larger circular orbits around Earth - to explain retrograde motion and apparent distance. However, epicycles made the geocentric model more convoluted, delaying the acceptance of the more accurate heliocentric model we know today. “The cost was a complex deviation from reality,” says Holler. “It’s cool to think about a hyperdimensional space, and advances in mathematics have come from understanding the interplay of dimensions, but do they really exist or are they modern day epicycles?”
This skepticism extends to the notion that our ability for novel thought is due to hyperdimensionality. “I don’t know of anyone who can visualize an object with greater than three spatial dimensions,” Holler says. The mathematical operations we perform on objects possessing more than three spatial dimensions are all algorithmic. This means that an operation on a fourth spatial dimension is performed in the same manner as an operation performed on a one, two, or three-dimensional object, says Holler. “The rules remain the same. Our visualizations of such objects are projections into a three-dimensional space in the way that a cube projected into two dimensions is a square.”
Even though Holler identifies as nonreligious and an atheist, he acknowledges that spiritual beliefs that are consistent with established physical principles can strengthen both faith and science. Still, he says that “hyperdimensionality borders on science fiction.”
The hands-on investigation of these realms is beyond our current scientific abilities. Even the European Council for Nuclear Research (CERN) hasn’t been able to provide a clear picture of higher dimensions. CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator, smashes particles together at high speeds to explore the fundamental building blocks of the universe. Scientists using the collider access infinitesimally small dimensions, smaller than a proton. If you enlarged a human hair to the width of a football field, a single proton would still be smaller than a grain of sand on that field. Yet, to see the higher-dimensional strings that quantum physics predicts, we need to get far more granular, using a kind of super-CERN or a cosmic megastructure like a Dyson Sphere.
Pravica has faith that, within his children’s lifetime, we’ll figure out a way to generate the incredibly high energies required to investigate other dimensions. Meanwhile, he remains a vocal supporter of hyperdimensionality.
“I see no point otherwise,” he says. “Why study? Why live?” Hyperdimensionality gives the physicist a purpose, a happiness that “transcends this universe.”
