Max S. Dunn

Blog: Folded Universe

Posted by: Max Dunn on March 18, 2010 14:16:49

Let's say you were going to design a universe. If it was like ours, there are billions of atoms in a person, there are billions of people on the planet, and there are billions of planets in the universe. Thats a lot of atoms! So how could you optimize that? Remember, you are not limited to working in just 3 dimensions but can make use of all 10.

First off, you could optimize by folding on scale. That is, fold the big objects back down into the little objects so they do double duty. Planets and suns can stand in for protons and electrons. This alone can save a tremendous amount of matter.

Next, fold back in on time. Since we are only going to allow free movement in 3 dimensions in this universe and tightly control the passage of time in the 4th dimension, we don't really need to keep any matter around that falls into the past. Like a bike wheel rolling forward, we can keep reusing matter that goes into the past and don't need to create the matter in the future until it becomes the present. And since the slice of time that we exist in is very small (on the order of the Planck constant), this trick is another way of saving a huge amount of matter.

So don't despair when creating your universe, through these simple tricks you can drastically cut down on the amount of matter that you need.