Do We Live On The Edge Of The Universe?

Picture

a square with four sides laid out in two

dimensions.

Now take the corners and extend lines

going perpendicular to the square

piercing into the third dimension and

forming a cube. Now take each of the

eight corners and extend a new line from

each of them. This time piercing into

the fourth dimension perpendicular to

every existing line in the cube.

This is a hyper cube, also known as a

tesseract.

Higher dimensional objects are almost

impossible to envision in your mind's

eye, but if you can, scientists in

mid-9th century England believed great

rewards would come your way.

For many Victorians of the time, the

fourth dimension represented the realm

of the spiritual, the font of divinity.

It had started in science with

mathematicians like Bernhard Reeman, who

had just devised a new kind of

extradimensional geometry beyond the

triangles of 180° and parallel lines we

had known before. And from there, the

fertile Victorian imagination turned the

fourth dimension into an almost magical

realm where we could find commune and

connection.

[Music]

But for HP Lovecraft, a New England

author born towards the end of the

century within the higher dimensions of

the universe, he found only horror.

In one of his tales, the dreams in the

witch house, Walter Gilman, a student of

physics and mathematics, finds that the

room he is renting has bizarre

dimensions.

Dreams come to him every night, drawing

him deeper into higher dimensional

plains filled with gods and monsters.

This Lovecraftian fear is fundamental

and inescapable. It is a fear of the

unknown, a fear of the true scale of the

wide universe and what lays beyond.

And yet some of us are brave or at least

foolish.

Some scientists have peered into the

depths of the cosmos, seeking the

darkness of those hidden dimensions.

For it appears that a century after

Lovecraft wrote about their horrors, we

now think that there is possibly some

truth to these ideas, but not quite in

the way he proposed. For it turns out

that yes, we may need to look to extra

higher dimensions for answers on the

true nature of the cosmos. But from a

lower viewpoint than we had originally

thought, our entire universe may be

nothing more than a thin two-dimensional

membrane. The answer to matter, gravity,

and even spacetime itself may lie in the

reduction of dimensions.

[Music]

Einstein was not a slow starter.

Documents show he was actually a child

prodigy excelling in physics. This was

helped by being surrounded by

electricity and magnetism in his youth.

The Einstein company run by his father

and uncle manufactured electrical

equipment. Encountering science at a

young age was clearly a huge factor in

his later development. His story is a

reminder of just how powerful early

curiosity can be. And nurturing that

spark is exactly what Kiwico aims to do.

KiwiCo offers monthly hands-on projects

designed for every age and interest,

from toddlers exploring the world for

the first time to teens and even adults

tackling advanced science, engineering,

and art projects. My producer and his

family had a great time with their crate

from the Kiwi Crate subscription line, a

monthly delivery for kids ages 6 to 9.

They got to build their own planetarium,

mix and match constellations, design

star patterns, and even see how the

Earth and Moon orbit the Sun. The kids

loved the excitement of opening the box,

and since the projects and elements are

reusable, they've been able to explore

them again and again. His family is

already counting down the days until

their next monthly delivery. So, if

you'd like to spark that same excitement

and inspire the little scientists and

engineers in your life, use my code

history of the universe for 50% off your

first monthly Kiwico crate or head to

kiwico.com/history

of the universe.

Possibly

[Music]

Gilman ought not to have studied so

hard. Non-ucuklitian calculus and

quantum physics are enough to stretch

any brain. And when one mixes them with

folklore and tries to trace a strange

background of multi-dimensional reality,

one can hardly expect to be wholly free

from mental tension.

Like Walter Gilman's exploration of his

rented room, the journey to higher and

lower dimensional answers is a strange

one. And it starts in the most unlikely

of places. Not in studies of the quantum

nature of reality or the edge of the

universe, but in an attempt to make more

efficient steam engines.

[Music]

Death is nothing, but to live defeated

and englorious is to die daily.

On the 15th of October 1815,

Napoleon, once the emperor of France and

master of half of Europe, set foot onto

his new domain, the tiny island of St.

Helena, his second exile and final

prison from where he would never return.

It is said that during his final years

on the rock, he insisted that the men

who served him wear military clothing

and the women evening gowns, his defeat

at Waterloo months before hard to

swallow.

But it was final. Never again would he

seize glory. Never again would he march

in triumph.

What he left behind was a fragile

monarchy restored in France. a regime

that did not take kindly to any friends

and associates of the exiled emperor and

that included a young Sadi Carnau, an

engineering officer of the French army.

Born in 1796, Sadi was the son of

Lazaro, the brilliant mathematician and

commander of the French Revolutionary

Army and one of the few who successfully

navigated the turmoil of the rise of

Napoleon. But Sadi would have no such

luck. He maintained his position in the

military, but was frequently passed over

for promotion due to his family's

connections to the exiled emperor.

Eventually, he took a pay cut to secure

what was essentially a sham position,

but one that allowed him to spend time

focusing on his intellectual

curiosities.

Curiosities that would change our entire

understanding of how reality works.

Believing that one of the causes of the

French defeat was the inefficiencies of

their engines, he sought to

mathematically describe the perfect

engine. In an essay entitled Reflections

on the Motive Power of Fire, dying in

1832, however, his treaties never got

the recognition it deserved in his

lifetime. But it would later turn out

that Carnau had unwittingly stumbled

upon the building blocks of an entirely

new kind of physics.

Decades later, his book would catch the

attention of Rudolph Clausius, a German

physicist and mathematician. Something

in Carno's work fired his ingenious

imagination. And in 1850, Clausius would

state what would eventually become known

as the second law of thermodynamics.

And 15 years later, he would introduce

the concept of entropy.

He had no idea what he had unleashed

upon the world.

[Music]

At its core, thermodynamics rests on

three basic laws. The first law of

thermodynamics is a version of

conservation of energy. Energy cannot be

created or destroyed, only transformed.

The second law, first observed by

Rudolfph Clausius, states that entropy

never decreases. This means among many

other things that heat does not

spontaneously move from a colder body to