Cosmic Overview.

I have been fascinated, lately, with various theories of cosmology. I have been watching documentaries, reading books, and studying online to try to understand (as well as possible) theories such as the big bang, relativity, and quantum physics.

The general acceptance of our time is that the universe had a beginning - the theory of the big bang - and has been expanding ever since. Through the theories of relativity, we also get the explanation of space being bent by mass, which simulates gravity. Also, we have the idea that the speed of light is a constant, always observed the same no matter how fast you are traveling in relation to the object that produced the light.

Several of these concepts are mind boggling, and I admit that I do not understand how these conclusions are reached (only that the theories are explained as having reached these conclusions).

Just as it took tremendous amounts of work and thought to come up with these theories, I cannot sit here and tackle each one and propose my own theories in a single blog entry. Therefore I shall try to keep it to one or two concepts at a time, even though they all interrelate. After all, the concept is to try to come up with some formula or theory that encompasses everything - some explanation that does not require exceptions.

That is the beauty, but also seems to be one of the major flaws of how we are going about explaining the cosmos, and I'm really not going to be much different, so no help there. The problem is that we are trying to come up with the theory that has the least holes, and as we find each explanation, put forth by truly spectacular and hard working minds, we latch on to and accept it until a theory with fewer exceptions earns enough adherents.

The bottom line is that for practical purposes in the every-day life we don't really need to know these things, though for deeper satisfaction we always seem to turn to greater questions - be they physical or metaphysical (or, as so many claim, some mixture of them both).

I am going to give the punch line at the beginning of the joke, so to speak, because I must do this in a disjointed (and probably interrupted) fashion. I will continue posts on politics, begin posts on hockey, and will be posting regarding science as well.

My belief is that the universe is actually four-dimensional, and I do not consider time a dimension. I mean there are four spatial dimensions. Most of us are familiar with the three dimensional terms length, breadth, depth. We can picture three dimensional objects, even render them in two-dimensional drawings. The question of where the fourth dimension goes, or the direction of the fourth axis, is somewhat more difficult to imagine. It can be imagined through extrapolation, which will be one of my next posts (if not the very next.

The difficulty in establishing this theory of mine is a lack of understanding about four-dimensional physics. Perhaps my hope is that through some of these posts, some of the physics can be figured out. Unfortunately, our experience appears to be largely limited to three dimensions, often simulating two or even one, but rarely (outside of Science Fiction) approaching four.

I believe, however, that even with some very basic and acceptable assumptions about four-dimensional physics, extrapolated from the growth from one-dimensional to two-dimensional, and from two-dimensional to three-dimensional physics, will allow us to produce very logical and simple explanations for how our own universe works - and make some interesting predictions about what we may find "out there".

I must also (laughingly) admit that I may, through these very posts, convince myself I am completely wrong. After all, Einstein convinced himself he was wrong even when he wasn't.