posted
Okay, this is a stupid question, but I hope you will tolerate me and explain.
After watching Stargate SG-1 last night (in which they kept a huge asteriod from hitting the earth by pulling it into hyperspace for a bit, just long enough to make it reappear on the OTHER side of earth) -- I asked my teenage sci-fi addict son to explain "hyperspace" to me. He couldn't do it in terms that I could understand.
Yes, I know I've read about it in all the sci-fi books and in every version on Star Trek, etc. But what exactly is "hyperspace" -- and how do they get there? Is it another dimension, that is outside of time? Explain it to this middle aged lady in words she can understand please.
posted
There may be actual attempts to justify hyperspace in real physics, but the fact is that it is one of the most abused concepts for travelling faster than light in SF.
Basically, it is an imaginary dimension of space-time in which the laws of normal space-time do not apply. This way authors didn't have to worry about that when they had ships zooming around the galaxy (and beyond).
While fun, it's just another deus ex machina.
Speed limit c, not just a good idea: it's the Law!
Looks like this Michio Kaku guy is the only one that has this whole theory of such a thing as hyperspace. Every google link referred to that name or his book.
Posts: 9538 | Registered: Aug 2003
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The visible universe has 4 dimentions. The first three are obvious length, width, depth. The fourth is space/time, which is what Einstein figured out.
Now for a quick aside: There is a major problem resolving what Einstein did with relativity (which deals with objects on the scale of stars and galaxies), and quantum mechanics (which deals with things in the sub-atomic size). The primary issue is dealing with gravity on a subatomic scale. Namely that we don't know how to resolve the two fo them (subatomic particals have negligible mass, and are treated as points w/ no size, and thus its sort of difficult to apply gravitational physics to them).
So, in the past quarter century something interesting fell out of quantum physics, and this is called string theory. The basic theory attempts to unify general relativity with quantum mechanics using a whole bunch of really scary math. Kaku describes super-string theory as 21st century physics which accidentally was discovered in the 20th century. The problem is that we don't have adequate math (at the time) or physics to empircally resolve whether super string theory is true.
But the basic deal is that super-string theory turns out that there are there are many more dimentions than 4 in the universe. Could be anywhere from 9 to 22 (the reason for the lack of clarity is sort of complicated). What happened with the dimentions that are above 4 is that they sort of ... snapped and wrapped up, like a pull down window shade. But, they coil so tightly that they can't be seen or accessed from the 4 dimenions we can see without quantities of energy that the earth has never before seen (maybe if we had control of a star we'd be able to do it). So the theory of hyperspace travel is, if we had enough energy, we could pry these wrapped-up dimentions fly through them, and end up elsewhere.
That is the deal.
[ September 15, 2003, 10:30 AM: Message edited by: Pod ]
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posted
Cool -- would be neat if we could really do it. Unfortunately, I won't get to live long enough to see if it ever pans out as true....
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posted
I think that it might be a little over-technical, but I'll try to keep it brief:
Hyperspace, technically, is that fifth dimension which we can't percieve. It is, to space and time like 3d space is to a plane. Edwin Abbott's Flatland is probably the perfect and seminal work on the concepts here (and very short and easy to read). The "tesseract" (or hypercube) mentioned in Madeline L'engle's A Wrinkle in Time also deals with this concept
The basic idea of hyperspace travel in sci-fi is that, where space-time curves, traveling in hyperspace allows the ship to cut across the infield, so to speak, and, without actually exceeding the speed of light, move from one part of space-time to another faster than if you had stayed in normal space.
The "warp" drive in Star Trek is the same basic idea, except that it, supposedly, warps space-time further in the area that the ship passes through, enabling it to achieve greater speed increases as the curvature is increased.
Hope that helps and isn't too late.
[ September 15, 2003, 07:53 PM: Message edited by: T. Analog Kid ]
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Actually TAK, what you describe in that latter part isn't hyperspace travel, that's warp bending, which is strictly speaking, 4 dimentional.
Hyperspace travel involves actually puncturing the 5th dimention and jumping on in. Star Trek like warp travel, simply involves rearranging the structure of space by "pinching" up a region of space (imagine taking a string and grabbing two parts of the string and touching them together, such that there is a hoop in the middle of the string) and then traveling from one end of the hoop to the other, and then letting space snap back into its original shape.
Thus, they never violate the speed of light, however, the distance travel over a period of time is much greater than the speed of light.
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posted
Oh, and farmgirl, it's currently a crapshoot whether the human race will ever get the amount of energy to find this sort of thing out. If the human race ever had that much energy we could annhilate far more than our puny earth, and thus, who knows whether the answer will ever be found.
Even if we do get that much energy, it'll be hundreds if not thousands of generations before we ever figure it out.
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posted
So Farm Girl, the simplest explanation I've heard is similar to the one Madeleine L'Engle uses to justify time travel in A Wrinkle in Time:
Basically, you imagine the universe as though it were a huge, flat piece of cloth. If you live within the world of the cloth, and you want to get from one point on the cloth to another, you have to actually travel the distance along the surface of the cloth.
But imagine that the cloth is all bunched up and thrown in the laundry bin. Then you have two options. You can either travel along the surface of the cloth, following all of its wrinkles and contours, or you can LEAVE the surface of the cloth, and find a shorter route through the air.
It's like the difference between measuring the length of a road, or measuring the distance "as the crow flies". If you're bound by some constraint, and are forced to follow a curved path, then speed limits pose a real problem. But the more constraints you lift, the straighter your path becomes, and the more capable you become of reaching your destination faster and faster.
So the theory is that our three-dimensional world is actually all bunched-up and wrinkled if you look at it from a larger perspective (four or more dimensions). If you can get a starship to leave the confines of the three dimensional world, you can take advantage of these bunches and wrinkles to plot a much straighter, much shorter course from point A to point B. This makes interstellar travel much more feasible ... though less plausible
I dunno, I just thought another explanation might make it all a bit clearer. Maybe I've just muddied the water Posts: 1907 | Registered: Feb 2000
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