Just watched Interstellar and boy! It was beauty. From flawlessly getting away with the paradoxes every sci fi movie (specially related to time travel) faces, to the celebrated black hole visualisation, everything was a work of art.
I was just wondering if we can help the lower dimensional people (If there are any) using a similar relay for our understandings of the worlds. But before that, we need to understand how the tesseract worked in the movie.
1. Tesseract
First thing first, this Tesseract is not an infinity stone. Die Marvel! From wikipedia,
In geometry, the tesseract is the four-dimensional analog of the cube (4-cube hypercube); the tesseract is to the cube as the cube is to the square.
Pretty much sums it up. As you can project a cube on a two dimensional space to get a square, similarly you can project a tesseract on 3. But the results aren't very intuitive, see image below.
In the movie, the higher civilization (referred as 'they') made a tesseract for Cooper to access time as a physical dimension so as to transfer the quantum data from black hole to Murph via gravitational leaks.
A quick hit of instinct might make you fall for the traditional time loop as seen in many sci fi movie. Time seems a locked dimension in normal space. But see it this way, as seen from outside the time, there is no relevance of past or present or future. Its yet another dimension.
. . . climb a mountain to visit the future . . .
Counterintuitive, these might seem. But its nice, intuition isn't fun (nor is helpful, talk Quantum mech if you want a debate). What (hypothetically) if we ourselves are on some higher dimension bandwagon and are treating someone's time as our space ?
"How would a lower (or higher) dimensional space be like? No, that's not possible." If you were born on a gas giant, you would have asked "How can life be on terrestrial planets ?".
2. Flatlanders
Maybe an organism (a disc) is in 2 dimensional space, moving ahead in x-direction. A time space diagram for it will be
The disc is pissed off with its life, (yes it has a developed mind to have a sense of time and presence) and speculates about time travel. But here we are, seeing this whole thing as a slant cylinder. It has no meaning for us, its just there, disc's time is our space.
What if you want to share the Interstellar experience with it ? You would make the disc see time as a physical dimension. You will make a hypercube for it. As they did.
The most important part in the movie was to recognise the importance of gravitational leak across dimensions, the method of transfer that can be understood by any n-dimensional organism. You would grant access to the disc to create gravitational anomalies in its 3 dimensions (2 space + 1 time), And an Interstellar event will happen in the flatland.
It all seems so immaterial to even have the need to be. Evolution is taking us places, creating organisms more adept to their environments, but on a scale that has no meaning (probably). I wonder, if one day, the unexplained gravitational phenomenon in our universe might lead us to some realization. The singularity, the dark forces, existence of multiverses, everything will be explainable after we really understand gravity.
In the movie, the (dumb) textbooks said that the Apollo mission was faked. People always connect scientific advancements with the other side that has personal benefits attached to them. Everyone goes mad when you spend a bit on an exploration where there is, apparently, no immediate benefit.
But, humans are explorers, its inside all of us. Survival instinct, they say.
We've always defined ourselves by the ability to overcome the impossible. And we count these moments. These moments when we dare to aim higher, to break barriers, to reach for the stars, to make the unknown known. We count these moments as our proudest achievements. But we lost all that. Or perhaps we've just forgotten that we are still pioneers. And we've barely begun. And that our greatest accomplishments cannot be behind us, because our destiny lies above us.