I have read that we have a “God-shaped hole” in our souls — read as psyche if you wish.
Any self-respecting monotheist will agree that for God to be omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent, he (or she or even they, yes, I know) would have to exist outside the normal plane of our existence. And if they are a creationist, they would have to accept that God dwells in an unobserved dimension outside our three-dimensional realm.
So far so good.
Physics is not as certain, but the beliefs are as ingrained. Many, if not most, modern physicists reconcile their equations with extra dimensions. There are whole temples of science and careers built around how many. One, ten, forty-seven, infinite… Some even believe that they are all curled up, like tiny angels, on the head of a pin.
Maybe I should have spelled that angles.
Too late now.
To the God-fearing, the proof of God lies in faith and revelation; for the physicist, the proofs are mathematical and circumstantial. Neither structure is concrete, although I have to say that, from a logical standing start, the circumstantial evidence for extra dimensions is compelling.
Without this turning into a lecture, consider this: there is an observed particle that has a rotational symmetry of 720 degrees. It’s mind-boggling. Think of a normal teacup. You rotate it in its saucer and the handle comes around once every rotation. Makes total sense. But what if the handle appeared only once every other full rotation?
Huh?
Where does it go? The answer is simple: through another dimension. But which one? Where?
It’s easy to calculate and hard to imagine. We are all familiar with the x, y, z axes. X — over there. Y — over here. Z — up there. Where is the fourth? Let’s give it a name. W. It lies at right angles to the others… in a direction that is unfathomable to us.
A brilliant physicist (who I will not embarrass by naming) talks of koi in a pond. They swim on the surface of their pond in two dimensions. Back and forth — or, if you feel Billy Connolly cruel, round and round and round. Then one day a hand reaches into the pond and plucks one out into the air.
They had no idea that other dimension was there. But we exist in it, and can interact with their plane of existence. So it is with physics equations — and so it must be for God.
What is most interesting is that the belief structure in physics is as intense as the faith structure in religion. It has the same architecture: axioms that cannot be shown directly, objects that cannot be seen, dimensions that must exist because the sums refuse to behave without them.
It’s almost as if the physicists are trying to fill a God-shaped hole.
But what if the hole isn’t God-shaped at all?
What if it’s W-shaped — and religion fills it with God because, historically, that’s all we understood?
What does this hole feel like? We cannot see it, measure it, or even imagine it — but nor could the koi.
Maybe we can sense it: dissatisfaction, absence, wonder… pressure. We know it is there, like the koi see shadows over their watery world. Those shadows the religious ascribe to the supernatural — the physicists to their equations.
I see a finger pointing at me from the other side of the bar. What about time as the fourth dimension? You say.
Nope. Time is pants as a fourth dimension — and besides, even Einstein suspected it wasn’t real.
I am talking about a real, physical, large, other space that we sense but cannot imagine — the other side of a sheet of paper.
We know, on a level we cannot explain, that there is a W-shaped hole in our perception.
What is through the hole?
No idea.
However, that does not stop the hole being used for every phenomenon. Let me run some candidates past you.
A three-O God — as described.
A physical rotational space.
Stranger Things… ah… got you now.
Yes. Every piece of popular culture these days has rips in reality. Philip Pullman cuts through with the Subtle Knife, spaceships travel through hyperspace and get to Zeta Reticuli forty thousand years faster than expected, romantasy heroes slip back into earlier times and become their own grandmothers. (I don’t know about this last one, but I would not be surprised.)
The W-shaped hole is not only at the heart of our belief systems; it is the solution to our wish fulfilment. Of course it is — because we feel the W-hole as an absence in our lives.
The latest craze is that all UFOs (now called UAPs by the nomenclature fetishists) stem from another dimension. This explains why the government denies extraterrestrials because — duh — they’re extra-dimensional.
None of this is frightening because it satisfies. So let me leave you with this thought.
The W-shaped hole is real because the W dimension is real.
What would be terrifying is if it were empty.
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