At the top of each entry of this blog is a Calabi-Yau image of ten-dimensional reality along with the title "Traveling through SpaceTime." (The Calabi-Yau image is named for mathematicians Eugenio Calabi who is an emeritus professor of mathematics at the Univ. of Penn. and Shing-Tung Yau, now at Harvard.)
Calabi-Yau images are a way that physicists and mathematicians model the reality that their mathematics describes. Super-string theory demonstrates mathematically that there are many more dimensions to reality than we humans can perceive directly. In some versions of the theory there are 6 or more, up to 11 dimensions. This does seem strange to us, but even for our normal perspective, it is easy to see that there are four dimensions we can work with. We usually say height, width and depth, but every object also has a perceivable history, past and future. So time is the fourth dimension. (Hence the word spacetime.)
So why can we not directly perceive the additional dimensions? For several reasons. Among them are that the "objects" that exhibit these additional dimensions are extremely small, billionths of trillionths of times smaller than objects visible even with our best microscopes--or even with the new Large Hadron Collider at CERN--the largest particle accelerator. But also because understanding all this requires advanced mathematics and most of us are just not in that league. It is all most of us can do to balance our checkbook; maybe, with difficulty we can even handle simple math of building a table or shelf or adjusting a recipe. Beyond that, even if our schools taught math better than they do, it might be beyond our abilities.
BUT, that doesn't mean these dimensions are not real. We can't see viruses, but our lives are affected by them. Even the most healthy of us seem to catch an occasional cold. Most people don't understand lasers, but they have no trouble using a DVD player which is completely based on lasers.
For a long time, longer than most people, I've been trying to understand spiritual reality. Of course, like most, my spiritual reality is based on our ordinary three--or four--dimensions of life. Super-strings, M-theory, p-Branes, and all the newly discovered understandings of reality, call into question a spirituality that is only based on these three or four dimensions.
Then I discovered Quantum Mechanics, where strange things happen; where photons seem to be in two places at the same time, except that as soon as you look at one, it decides at which location it will be; where the only certainty is a probability, not actuality; where objects separated by light-years are intertwined and affected by each other. Quantum Mechanics is not conjecture; Some technology we use daily is based on it: Computers, cellphones, modern aircraft and cars, CD and DVD, the laser-based measuring equipment that modern surveyors and carpenters use. Suddenly, spirituality based on everyday perception began to corkscrew. Spirituality based on eternal verities became and becomes a pretense to cover cowardly weak thinking.
The spiritual guides of the past, Abraham, David, Gautama, Mohamed, all based their understanding on some version of a world that is no longer even a fantasy in the world of the least educated among us. That doesn't necessarily mean that the underlying truths are wrong, only that the old visions no longer tell those truths. The bible understanding of the world where heaven is a dome held up by four columns. Windows in the dome open and allow rain to fall. That world does not exist and spirituality that takes it as serious fact cannot satisfy any thinking human being in the present time.
Super-strings, M-theory, p-Branes, and all the newly discovered understandings of reality, call into question a spirituality that is only based on these three or even four dimensions of height, width, depth and time.
No. I do not have a new spirituality. Those who base their spiritual claims on specious science do not either.
But we must seek out the new frontiers of spirituality, not based on science or mathematics, but accounting for the realities those disciplines are providing us. I don't know the size or shape of a reality that accounts for super-strings, but I do know that it will include some form of Jesus' commands to feed the hungry, visit those in prison, care for the ill and the poor--and the similar directives of other religions. It will not appeal to a supernatural god who magically creates the universe, but it will derive from universal godness in all creation.
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