
Did the Early Universe Have One Dimension? - Rickasaurus
http://www.buffalo.edu/news/12493
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teraflop
The gory details are apparently in these two papers. I'm not a physicist so
they're pretty opaque to me.

<http://arxiv.org/abs/1003.5914>

<http://arxiv.org/abs/1102.3434>

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51Cards
If so then Flatland was a story not so much of mathematics, but of evolution.

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mkrecny
This hypothesis makes me wonder about the following:

1\. What sort of threshold would cause the universe to develop another
dimension? Could this have something to do with the concept of emergence, and
discrete levels of organization? Perhaps when a given dimension (or set of
dimensions) contain enough 'complexity' to start exhibiting emergent behavior,
information about that emergent layer can effectively be encoded in a 'new'
dimension.

2\. When such a threshold is crossed the amount of information required to
describe the universe jumps dramatically. Isn't this inconsistent with what we
believe to be true of the level of the velocity of entropy in complex systems?

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Jach
Can you rephrase #1 without using the words "emergence", "emergent", or
"complexity"? I'm having a hard time following what you're talking about.

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jonsen
_Complexity - The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos_ by M.
Mitchell Waldrop

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Jach
Amazon reviews don't give me good feelings about that book. Got any others?

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jonsen
I haven't, sorry. I'm almost through _Complexity_ and I can only say it works
for me. It's non technical but I agree with the statement _In general, he
makes the emerging nature of complexity theory accessible to the general
reader_ from the Editorial Reviews. It has given me a good overview and a
conceptual framework for digging deeper.

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sliverstorm
If it could have been one dimensional, could it have been zero dimensional?

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dereg
Is it possible to conceive of something of anything less than one dimension?
If so, how? I'm thinking about the way that Carl Sagan used the tesseract to
represent four dimensions.

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sliverstorm
I just imagine a pinprick of light emanating from a point. The place where
light is only exiting, not entering, is a point with no dimensions.

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ck2
If it was pure energy and of no mass for a moment, I could imagine that there
would be no gravity and therefore a possible lack of dimension?

Then hydrogen atoms form and you've got mass and then gravity.

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sebkomianos
"Gravitational waves can't exist in one- or two-dimensional space. So
Stojkovic and Mureika have reasoned that the Laser Interferometer Space
Antenna (LISA), a planned international gravitational observatory, should not
detect any gravitational waves emanating from the lower-dimensional epochs of
the early universe."

So if it doesn't their theory is proven correct?

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jonhendry
Only if there are no alternative explanations for the data. If this turned out
to be the only viable explanation, then this theory will stand, at least
pending more data that might strengthen it or show it to be in error.

