(1) The highest levels of dimension and its terrifying consequences - YouTube
Transcripts:
Most people think of dimensions as directions, left, right, forward and back, up and down, and maybe time as well if we're feeling generous. This framing is comfortable because it preserves the idea that reality is fundamentally stable and that higher dimensions are simply extensions of what we already know.
But that assumption is completely wrong. In the next 30 minutes, you're going to question everything you thought you knew about the universe. With each new dimension that we explore, it'll become clearer to you that the physical laws that bind us are not universal. They're local, conditional, dependent on the fact that we're trapped in the third dimension.
But let's not get ahead of ourselves now. To understand higher dimensions, we must first understand the most basic of them, the first and second dimensions. A one-dimensional world is a line. It has length, but nothing else. No width, no depth, no concept of around or beside. The only movement that exists is forward and backward.
To trap a one-dimensional object, you only need two lines, one in front and the other behind. That alone completely traps the object. But a two-dimensional object can simply step to the left or the right to escape this prison. In two dimensions, we roughly start to see the world as we know it taking shape.
Length and width forms a plane. You get shapes like squares and circles. The concepts of beside and around, they start to make sense. But depth is still missing. And that absence carries consequences that are easy to overlook when you don't think too deeply about them. In a two-dimensional world, nothing has an interior in the way that we understand it.
Everything is defined by its outline. A body is not a volume, but it's a border. A creature sees only edges, never what lies within another being, no matter how close it gets. From inside that world, this feels normal. It's complete. It's sufficient up until something looks down on it. Now, a three-dimensional observer like us viewing a two-dimensional plane instantly destroys this illusion of privacy.
Every internal structure is visible at once. Hearts, organs, mechanisms, all exposed without any resistance. There's no need to cut into these objects to see inside the creature because inside and outside are not protected categories anymore. They were simply artifacts of limited perspective. This is the first truly unsettling lesson of dimensions.
The way that our world works, we think of using force to invade. But when you start thinking in the level of dimensions, you don't need any kind of force. You can simply bypass all of those defense mechanisms. Think of it like trying to use a wall to stop a ghost. It'll simply just go through the wall like that resistance didn't exist in the first place.
If a three-dimensional being turns the hat of a two-dimensional being over, there's now no way for that two-dimensional being to ever get that hat back in place. To make things more unsettling, a three-dimensional being could perform surgery on a two-dimensional creature without ever breaking its skin. The organs of the two-dimensional creature would simply disappear without any force or resistance.
From the lower dimensional point of view, this would feel like magic or divine intervention or reality malfunctioning. The same logic then applies to imprisonment. So, in two dimensions, drawing a square around a creature is a perfect prison. There's no up, no down. That boundary is absolute. But to a three-dimensional being, the prison isn't just broken.
It's wholly irrelevant. One step over the line, and everything is well non-existent. Nothing about the square has changed, by the way. The rules just stopped applying. And I want to be clear, this is not a metaphor. This is how dimensions work. Now with that in mind, consider the uncomfortable implication. Our own sense of physical laws only feel absolute because we are trapped inside them.
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Also, use the code aperture thinking to get 100 blades for free. That's more than 2 years worth of shaving. And trust me on this one, you will thank yourself. All right, now back to our story. We live in three dimensions. Length, width, depth. From this we get volume and mass. This is the first dimension where knots can exist.
A string can loop around itself without passing through itself. Constraints feel real here because there's no higher spatial direction available to resolve them. This is why three-dimensional problems feel permanent. A wall blocks you. A body confines you. A prison cell feels inescapable. Every solution that we imagine is still forced to obey the same geometry.
And even in our futuristic fantasies, they reveal this limitation. What's the most futuristic mode of transport that you can think of? A lot of you, I'm going to guess, said flying cars, right? It's what comes to my mind first. That alone reveals the fundamental limitations of only thinking in three dimensions. Every futuristic form of transport we have is simply finding a way to bypass two-dimensional congestion by exploiting the third dimension.
Subways go under, planes go over. All these different inventions do is bypass the two-dimensional traffic. It doesn't free us from the limitations of time and space. So far, physics feels strict, but they're understandable. Everything has a physical limit that we cannot break, no matter how far ahead we think.
However, this feeling completely falls apart once you start going higher. The fourth dimension arrives in two forms and both are destabilizing. The first is time and not time as the poetic passing of events that we conceptualize it to be but as a coordinate. In this understanding, you don't simply exist somewhere. You also exist sometime.
And in a way, we already experience this dimension. Uh, a location without a time is meaningless to us. Meet me at the library is incomplete without at noon. Seen this way, you're not a body moving through time. You're a four-dimensional object stretched across it, a world line. Your birth, every action you've ever taken, and your death are not events that you approach.
They're locations on a structure you already occupy. You experience this structure one slice at a time the way a two-dimensional being would experience a three-dimensional object passing through its plane. This alone quietly breaks our intuition about freedom. If time is a dimension, then your life isn't unfolding.
It already exists as a shape from start to finish. You are predefined. But the more disturbing interpretation of the fourth dimension is spatial. A fourth spatial dimension does to us exactly what we do to two-dimensional worlds. A four-dimensional observer wouldn't see your surface. They would see everything. Organs, blood flow, digestion, tumors, neural activity, your entire body exposed without any form of penetration.
The same you can conduct surgery on a two-dimensional object without any injuries is the same way a four-dimensional object can on you. Now, to you, this would feel like a a violation without cause, a lawless intrusion. To them, it would feel as trivial as placing your finger in the middle of a circle. If a four-dimensional object entered our world, we would not perceive it as a whole object.
We would only be able to observe its cross-sections. A point appearing from nothing and disappearing from nowhere, growing into a sphere, shrinking, vanishing, a ghost. Not because it's transparent, but because it's incomplete. At this level, physics don't explode yet. But it does give us a glimpse. It shows us that everything that we think is protected on a fundamental level simply isn't.
Now, the fourth dimension doesn't feel dangerous at first. It feels abstract. It It almost feels philosophical. It's something you can gesture towards without letting it touch you. But abstraction is only a shield until the structure begins to assert itself. Once you follow the consequences instead of the metaphor, the fourth dimension becomes the point where physics stops acting like a barrier and starts behaving like a suggestion.
In three dimensions, knots are permanent. They are a physical fact. A string can trap itself. A constraint forms because there is no available direction for escape. And this is why our headphones getting tangled feel so frustrating. The problem isn't the string itself. It's the space. The moment you introduce a fourth spatial dimension, knots lose their meaning.
A knotted shoelace lifted into four dimensions simply slides around itself and falls apart. Nothing is breaking. You're not cutting the string. The knot just doesn't resist. It never truly existed. It was just an illusion created by insufficient room for it to explore. And this is a recurring pattern in higher dimensions.
What feels like structure from below turns out to be congestion, a limit of space and not an impossibility. This is why certain objects cannot exist properly in our universe. Take the Klein bottle for example. In three dimensions, it looks like a bottle that intersects itself as if it were carelessly designed.
But in four dimensions, it doesn't intersect at all. It has no inside and no outside. The contradiction isn't in the objects. It's in the space that we're forcing them into. When mathematicians draw a Klein bottle in three dimensions, they're not showing you what it is. They're showing you what happens when something real is crushed into an insufficient world.
And this matters because it hints at something that is deeply unsettling. Reality as we know it may be full of objects and processes that only look paradoxical because we're seeing broken projections of them and not the full thing. By the time we reach the fifth dimension, physics begin to betray its own assumptions.
In the 1920s, Theodore Kutza rewrote Einstein's equations of gravity using five dimensions instead of four. This mathematical experiment was designed to ask one simple question. What would happen if spacetime had one more spatial direction? The result was unexpected and deeply uncomfortable. The equations split cleanly into two parts.
One part described gravity exactly as Einstein had formulated it. The other part described electromagnetism with perfect precision. Light, magnetism, electric fields, all of it emerged automatically. In five dimensions, electromagnetism is not a separate force. It's geometry. This means something profound and very difficult to sit with.
Light may not be fundamental. It may be a vibration in a direction that we can't access, a ripple in a dimension that we don't experience. From our perspective, gravity and light feel distinct because we are confined to a slice of reality that fractures them apart. However, from five dimensions, they could very well be the same phenomenon, just viewed from different angles.
At this point, physics stops feeling like a set of rules and starts feeling like a a shadow. Geometry also begins behaving strangely here. As dimensions increase from 1 to 5, the volume of a unit sphere grows. Space becomes more generous. The sphere reaches its maximum volume in the fifth dimension.
And this is the peak, the moment where space is the most efficient at containing things. Then something breaks. At six dimensions, volume starts to shrink. Now, this is counterintuitive in a way that cannot be visualized. You are adding more room and yet objects occupy less of it. Spheres become smaller relative to the space that they inhabit.
Packing becomes inefficient and distance itself loses meaning. This is the point where string theory becomes unavoidable. String theory is often framed as speculative, but mathematically it's an act of desperation. When physicists try to unify quantum mechanics and gravity, the equations just refuse to behave. Probabilities stop adding up to one, and the math collapses into nonsense.
Unless the universe has six extra spatial dimensions, and not metaphorically, literally. These dimensions are not extended like ours. They're compact, curled into complex shapes known as calabi manifolds. And these shapes aren't decorative. Their topology determines the properties of particles, mass, charge, interaction strength.
The laws of physics may not be laws at all. They may be consequences of hidden geometry. So you change the shape and you could very well change the universe. This introduces a deeply unsettling possibility. What we call the constants of nature may be environmental accidents. Features of how space is folded rather than truths about reality itself.
By now intuition is useless. You you can't picture six dimensions. I I can't. Visualization fails because our brains evolved to navigate three. What remains is just pattern recognition. And the pattern is clear. Higher dimensions do not add complexity evenly. They introduce zones of order and zones of collapse.
And this much becomes undeniable in the eighth dimension. Now, dimensions 5 through 7 are mathematically messy. We don't know their exact sphere packing limits. The geometry resists optimization. It feels chaotic. Then suddenly in eight dimensions, certainty returns. Mathematicians know exactly how many spheres can touch a central sphere in eight dimensions. 240.
And that's not approximately. That's exactly 240. These spheres arrange themselves into a structure called an E8 lattice. A configuration so perfect it cannot be improved upon. This is not an abstract curiosity. The same structure appears in string theory, group theory, and error correcting codes. The geometry of 8dimensional space is so efficient that it helps modern technology recover lost information.
reality at certain dimensional depths becomes better at preserving order than we are. This raises an uncomfortable question. Why does structure to suddenly decide of its own valition if it has that to reappear here in the eighth dimension? Why does the universe seem to prefer certain dimensions? There is no answer yet.
only the implication that dimensionality is not neutral. Some dimensions support coherence, others erode it. Beyond this point, containment itself begins to fail. In nine dimensions, a sphere placed inside a hyper cube grows so large relative to the cube's corners that it begins touching edges that should be distant by our logic.
By the 10th dimension, the sphere protrudes outside the cube entirely. This is not a mistake. The math is correct. A boundary no longer bounds. And yet 10 dimensions are required for super string theory to make sense at all. Without them, reality contradicts itself. At this level, physics does not break violently.
It stops defending the idea that inside and outside are meaningful categories. And once that protection is gone, nothing we consider solid remains safe. Up to this point, higher dimensions have behaved like unfair advantages. They bypass walls, undo knots, merge forces. Even when geometry becomes strange, it still feels rulebound, as if reality is playing a more complicated game, but remaining coherent.
That illusion does not survive the next threshold. Beyond 10 dimensions, space stops behaving like a place where things can be meaningfully arranged. Optimization fails. Intuition dies completely. What remains is not chaos in the dramatic sense, but something colder, indifference. One of the first signs of this appears in a phenomenon mathematicians call the sausage catastrophe.
In lower dimensions, if you try to pack spheres efficiently, you cluster them, you stack oranges, you form lises, complexity improves efficiency. And this logic holds all the way up through familiar space and even into the moderately high dimensions. Then at 42 dimensions, it breaks permanently. From dimension 42 onwards, it is mathematically proven that the most efficient way to pack spheres is not to cluster them at all.
It's to line them up in a single endless chain. No matter how many spheres you add, no amount of clever arrangements beats a straight line. All higher dimensional cleverness collapses into monotony. This is not just unintuitive, it's intellectually humiliating. Every instinct about structure fails. Space no longer rewards complexity.
It actively punishes it. And this matters because it reveals something unsettling about highdimensional reality. There are regimes where structure is not favored at all. Order does not emerge. It's suppressed. Before reaching that collapse, however, there is one last moment of almost supernatural elegance. Dimension 24.
Like dimension 8, 24 is a mathematical anomaly, a rare island of perfection in an otherwise turbulent dimensional sea. In 24 dimensions, spheres arrange themselves into the leech lattice. One central sphere can be touched by exactly 196,560 others without overlap. This number is not approximate. It is exact. Even more unsettling is where this structure appears.
The leech lattice is not just theoretical. It's used in real world error correcting code. When information is transmitted through noisy channels, be it space probes, deep space communication, or digital storage. This 24-dimensional geometry helps recover meaning from corruption. In other words, information survives chaos because of a structure that exists far beyond our reality.
And this reframes something fundamental. Perhaps higher dimensions are not where physics breaks, but where it's repaired. Perhaps the reason information feels conserved in our universe is not because of a law that we understand, but because deeper geometry refuses to let meaning fully dissolve. However, this is the last kindness. Beyond this point, dimensions stop feeling like scaffolding and start feeling like eraser.
At sufficiently high dimensions, volume behaves in a way that openly contradicts containment. A hypersphere placed inside of a hyper cube grows larger than the cube meant to contain it. The inside object becomes larger than its boundary. Containment fails in principle, not in practice. This is not poetry, by the way.
It is literal mathematics. Some estimates place this inversion around hundreds of dimensions. The exact number is debated, but the implication is not. At extreme dimensionality, the very idea of a container collapses. Inside and outside lose their distinction. At this depth, geometry no longer respects borders.
So, how could such dimensions exist without tearing our universe apart? Well, because we're not immersed in them. They're compact, folded, hidden at scales too small to probe directly, like a garden hose viewed from far away. Higher dimensions collapse into invisibility when observed at insufficient resolution.
To us, space looks three-dimensional because we cannot see the curvature wrapped inside of it. But invisibility does not mean irrelevance. If these dimensions exist, they can vibrate and vibrations carry energy. In theories that include extra dimensions, these vibrations manifest as heavy, longived particles known as moduli.
They are not part of everyday matter as we understand it. They are echoes of geometry, fluctuations in how space itself has been folded. For a very brief moment after the big bang, these moduli may have dominated the universe. Not matter, not radiation, but geometry. Space was ringing like a struck bell. They decayed quickly, but their decay may have left behind something quieter and harder to detect. Axons.
Ghostly particles that barely interact with matter. A background hum from dimensions we can't enter but may still be able to hear. This suggests something deeply unsettling. The early universe may have been governed by dimensions we no longer inhabit. Our current reality may be the cooled collapsed residue of a higher dimensional phase.
Physics as we know it may be what survives after geometry settles into a simpler form. Seen this way, our universe is not fundamental. It's stabilized. This reframes what it means for physics to break. It doesn't shatter like glass. It thins. Assumptions lose their grip. rules fade as soon as the dimensional context changes.
From the perspective of higher space, nothing we experience is violated. It is simply local and locality is fragile. Every time we climb a dimension, what once felt impossible becomes trivial. Walls become lines. Knots become illusions. Forces merge. Boundaries fail. Optimization collapses. At the highest levels, space does not feel hostile. It feels uninterested.
Which leaves one final question. If higher dimensions exist, and if our universe is merely a cross-section of something much larger, then what we call reality may not be a place at all, but a shadow cast by geometry we are not equipped to perceive. And shadows do not control the objects that cast them. By this point, dimensions have stripped space of its reliability.
Walls no longer confine. Shapes no longer contain. Order appears and disappears without warning. But there's one assumption still standing, quietly holding the whole structure together. That assumption is observation. Now, so far we've treated dimensions as places, spaces where objects exist and geometry behaves badly.
But at the highest levels, dimensions stop acting like environments and start acting like conditions under which reality becomes definite at all. This is where physics stops being just unsettling and starts becoming existential. In classical reality, observation is passive. You look at something and it reveals what was already there.
A coin lands heads or tails before you see it. A planet follows its orbit whether or not anyone is watching. This assumption feels so natural that it's rarely questioned. Quantum mechanics destroys that. At the quantum level, objects do not have definite properties until they are measured. An electron does not choose a position.
It exists as a spread of possibilities, a wave of potential. Only when interaction occurs does reality collapse into a single outcome. Reality behaves as if it does not commit to a single state until it's forced to. This introduces a dimension that is not spatial, not temporal, but conditional. A dimension where what exists depends on what is known.
The deeper you follow this, the more disturbing it becomes. Consider the double slit experiment. When particles are fired through slits without observation, they form an interference pattern. proof that each particle behaves like a wave passing through both slits at once. The moment you measure which slit the particle goes through, the interference disappears.
The particle behaves like a solid object. Nothing physical is touching the particle or acting on it differently. Only the information is changing. This suggests that reality is not responding to force. It is responding to knowledge. At this point, the idea of dimensions as places breaks down.
The system seems to care less about where things are and more about whether distinctions have been made. This reaches its breaking point in a thought experiment known as Vner's friend. Imagine a scientist inside a sealed laboratory measuring a quantum particle. From their perspective, the particle collapses into a definite state.
The experiment is complete. Reality has resolved. Now let's imagine another observer outside the lab who has not looked inside. From their perspective, the entire lab, the scientist, the notebook, the measuring device and the particle exists in a state of quantum superp position. The experiment for that second observer has not been resolved yet.
Both perspectives are surprisingly mathematically valid. So where does the collapse actually happen? Is reality definite when the scientist observes it or only when the outside observer opens the door? If both are correct, then reality does not have a single state. It has observer dependent layers.
And I want to clarify here, this is not philosophical speculation. Variations of this very paradox are being tested now experimentally. At this level, dimension is no longer about geometry. It is about who is allowed to say what is real. The unsettling implication is this. Reality may not be globally consistent. It may only be locally coherent relative to observers embedded within it.
Which means that what you experience as a stable world may be a cross-section not just of higher space but of a higherformational structure. And this reframes earlier dimensional violations in a new light. A four-dimensional being bypasses your walls because the walls were only constraints within your slice of reality.
A higher dimensional observer may bypass your facts the same way. From above, contradiction disappears. This raises a very dangerous question. If reality collapses based on observation, then what qualifies as an observer? Is it consciousness, measurement devices, interaction itself? Well, physics does not answer this cleanly.
Different interpretations exist. Some say that consciousness matters. Others say it doesn't. Some claim all possibilities exist simultaneously, branching into separate universes. This leads to the many worlds interpretation. In many worlds, collapse never happens. Every possible outcome occurs, each in its own branch of reality.
The universe splits continuously, fracturing into countless timelines. From this perspective, dimensions are not just directions, they're branches. You experience one path because your consciousness is embedded within it. Other versions of you exist elsewhere, making different choices, meeting different ends, and not metaphorically, literally.
This introduces a dimension that cannot be traveled through, only inhabited. A dimension of outcomes. The unsettling part is not that many worlds exist. It's that from your perspective, they're invisible, but from a higher vantage point, they may be equally real. Which brings us to the most uncomfortable possibility of all.
Consciousness itself may be a lowdimensional phenomenon. It's not special, not central, simply trapped. If awareness arises from physical processes confined to a particular dimensional slice, then higher dimensional structures may not experience reality sequentially at all. They may not experience time as flow. They may not experience individuality as separation.
To such entities, your entire life might be a static object, a pattern, a completed structure. This mirrors the earlier insight about world lines. You are not moving through time. You're stretching across it. Now imagine a perspective where even that extension is visible all at once. From there, choice doesn't disappear.
It simply stops feeling open-ended. This is why higher dimensions feel creepy. Not because they introduce monsters or chaos, but because they remove narrative. Cause and effect lose their emotional weight. Effort loses its drama. Becoming gives way to being. At the highest levels, physics does not describe events. It describes structure.
And structure, well, it doesn't care how it feels to live inside of it. Which brings us to the final reframing. Perhaps the reason higher dimensions feel so hostile to intuition is not because they're alien, but because they reveal that intuition was never designed to survive truth at scale. Our minds evolve to navigate a narrow slice of reality where surfaces matter, time flows forward, and observation feels harmless.
But beyond that slice, the universe does not become supernatural. It becomes honest. After walking through the highest dimensions, one question refuses to go away. If reality is this fragile, if walls are optional, time is a coordinate, forces are geometry and observation shapes existence, then why does the universe feel so stable? Why does your body feel solid? Why does cause usually follow effect? Why does the world behave well enough for life to exist at all? And the answer isn't that higher dimensions are absent. It's that we are embedded too
deeply in a narrow slice of them to notice their freedom. Stability is not a feature of the universe. It's a byproduct of confinement. Just as two-dimensional creatures would swear that lines are absolute and interiors don't exist, we swear that surfaces matter, that objects are sealed, that time flows forward, and that observation is harmless.
These beliefs aren't wrong necessarily. They are locally correct. They hold only because we are trapped inside the same dimensional bottleneck. Every higher dimension we've explored reveals the same pattern. Rules do not fail everywhere at once. They fail only when viewed from above. Walls fail from the third dimension.
Knots fail from the fourth. Forces merge in the fifth. Containment collapses beyond the 10th. Structure itself dissolves at extreme dimensionality. Yet inside each layer, reality still feels complete. This is why physics appears stable to us yet incomplete. It's not lying to us. It's speaking only about the part of reality we are allowed to inhabit.
Now, this reframes the idea of physics breaking. Physics does not break when equations fail. It breaks when we ask them to apply outside their jurisdiction. The moment we demand global truth from local rules, paradoxes appear. This is why higher dimensions feel so disturbing to us. They expose that everything we trust, causality, containment, individuality, is provisional, useful, but not fundamental.
Even time, the axis we rely on to make sense of our lives, loses its authority at higher dimensional views. Past and future become positions, not processes. Change becomes geometry. From above, your entire life may exist as a static object, a structure with no privileged now, not unfolding, just there in its entirety.
And this does not mean your experiences are meaningless. It means meaning is not created by sequence alone. And this is where the human discomfort peaks. Because if higher dimensions exist, then suffering, choice, effort, and identity are not erased, but they are recontextualized. They stop being the center of reality and become features of a particular slice.
And that is the true source of the unease. We aren't disturbed by the idea of extra space. We are disturbed by the idea that we are not narratively central, that our struggles do not drive the universe forward, that our decisions do not shape reality globally, that our sense of becoming may be a local illusion inside a larger already structured hole.
And yet, I think at least there is a strange relief hidden here. If higher dimensions reveal that reality is larger than our slice, then the fragility that we feel, it may not be personal. It may be structural. That anxiety, that something is off with existence might not be a flaw in human psychology after all.
It may be an accurate response to living inside a constrained projection. Our minds evolved to survive, not to see the full shape of reality. We never needed it to live dayto-day. Which explains to us why higher dimensions feel so wrong. They don't threaten us with monsters or chaos. There is no Cthulhu waiting in the sixth dimension.
They just threaten us with irrelevance. They suggest that the universe does not revolve around what we can perceive, measure, or narrate. That the deepest structure of existence operates at scales where our intuition just can't follow. And yet, we're here anyway. We move. We choose. We care. And perhaps that's the final paradox.
Even if higher dimensions exist, even if reality is far stranger and colder than we imagine, experiences still happen locally. Meaning still arises inside slices. Consciousness still navigates its narrow corridor as if it were the whole. And maybe that's not a failure. Maybe it's the only way anything can feel real to us at all.
Because a universe fully aware of its highest dimensions might be perfectly structured and completely unlivable. So reality compromises. It hides its depth. It stabilizes surfaces. It enforces time. It protects identity. Not because these things are fundamental, but because without them, nothing inside that slice could survive. In that sense, physics does not break at higher dimensions. It lets go.
And what remains is not chaos, but a quiet reminder that what we experience as reality is not the universe itself, but the version of it that allows us to exist. Which, depending on your point of view, may be the most beautiful or unsettling truth of all.