Basics of a Fivedimensional Worldview

©1997 Cyberhobbit

Modern theoretical physics provides deep insights into a postmodern understanding of time and space. As basis for my understanding of space and time, the fourth dimension etc. I rely therefore on concepts coming from physics, esp. radical new cosmologies like provided by Maarten Dillinger. I therefore translated some extracts of his controversial essay 'Grundlagen eines fünfdimensionalen Welbildes' published in a book with the meaningful title 'Vom Wesen der Anarchie und vom Verwesen verschiedener Wirklichkeiten' ('About the character of anarchy and about the decomposition of different realities').

I hope it helps to make some of the physical allusions in this social-scientific paper more understandable.

Maarten Dillinger:

"TV has to fight a lot with the problem, to represent spacial depth, the third dimension on a flat, twodimensional screen. There are not only two, but as every child knows three dimensions, which are length, breadth and depth. The last became finally conjured on the flat screen by a sophisticated system consisting of a double recording-camera and two-colored glasses for the audience.

However except of the commonly accepted three dimensions of space there are two more, that because of their spacial construction cannot be perceived by human at all or only indirectly. To deal with this mis-construction of the human, esp. mathematics tries to imagine a two-dimensional, flat world, which inhabitants are also only flat. According to their flat bodies which only consists of the two dimensions, length and breadth, their borders to the outer world are only lines - similar to a printed letter on the page in front of us. In analogy to the threedimensional human, one can now with a certain logic conclude, that for these creatures a third dimension is as unimaginable as the fourth (or any further) is for us humans. However there is in principle the possibility of the existence of higher dimensions, that exceed the number of the own environment.

Science has therefore introduced a fourth dimension, namely time. One has however to realise, that that, what we perceive as time is only the indirect perception, of what is represented in a fourth dimension. [..] In astronomy however there are concrete models of the world, in which time becomes included into many reflections as the fourth dimension and as concrete fact."

Maarten Dillinger goes on with some reflections about Einstein's special and general theory of relativity and some of their basic problems, which can be solved by what he calls the absolute theory of relativity:

"A first basic presupposition, that lead to the completion of this new theory, is that by principle all higher dimension should be measured in the normal scale of length. Instead of the at the moment most accepted four-dimensional world-view, which allots the fourth dimension the unit 'second', the absolute theory of relativity gives this fourth and the new fifth dimension the unit 'meter' (respectively 'inch' etc.). [..] The second presupposition consists in the statement, 'that space and with it all matter moves with the speed of the light from the past in direction of the future.' This for us so completely incomprehensible movement is nothing else than what we perceive as time or the course of history." [..]

He goes on with some more presuppositions about the fifth dimension to come to the conclusions and explanatory advantages of this new cosmology.

"The factor time does not exist anymore [..] and also speed for this timeless direction is something impossible, because this can only exist together with time (as divisor, e.g. m/s)."