A Black Hole in Hyperspace Inspired by the Film “Lucy”

As I was watching the Luc Besson film Lucy, something occurred to me that may change my view on what happens inside a black hole.  Toward the end of the film, the singularities of two black holes are seen to converge inside a 4-D hyperspace.  This happens just as Lucy obtains her "full capacity" of knowledge.  For those who haven't seen the film, Lucy is taking a drug that allows her to use 100% of her brain (riding the myth that we humans only use 10% of our brain, which has been debunked).  Through the film, she is continuously accessing hidden regions of her brain, transforming her into a cosmic genius with all kinds of extra-sensory perceptions, including telekenesis, telepathy, divination, etc. 

Since we are unable to see things in four dimensions, the film had to show these singularities converging in 3-D space.  On film it looked a lot like the bottoms of two whirlpools coming together underwater.  However, this isn't how it really looks, because the gravity inside a black hole is so strong that it literally sends matter into hyperspace once it goes beyond the event horizon.  Rather, what we see in Lucy is just a 3-D representation of what it might look like. 

Reflecting on this visual, I reached an epiphany about the nature of singularities.  What if all the black hole singularities in the universe converge at the same point- at the center of hyperspace?  The idea would work much in the same way that gravity does; neighboring singularities would converge first, then as they gathered collectively, they'd have greater powers of attraction. The strongest of these attractors would settle into the center of hyperspace, and its gravity would constantly pull weaker ones into its asymptote.  All matter would essentially be squished into a tiny space with an even greater infinite density than one singularity would. 

Let's try to make sense of this visually, if we can. Much like the living geometrical figures in Edwin Abbot's Flatland, we can’t see any extra dimensions beyond us.  However, there is evidence of a fourth dimension if we consider Einstein's general theory of relativity, which arises from the curvature of space-time caused by massive bodies.  In this context, we will think of gravity as causing the fourth dimension of space. 

Though we can detect gravity, we can't actually see it. It bends all of space in invisible waves that can probably be detected much more clearly in 4-D hyperspace.  Adding this extra dimension likens our 3-D space to a 2-D figure.  In a black hole, gravity gets distorted so strongly that it rips through space-time.  Once an event horizon is created, everything in a black hole enters something beyond our universe.  That something is called a 4-D hyperspace. 

There are trillions of black holes in the universe.  Each of them have whirlpools of matter that probably spin around in hyperspace, serving as a pathway to their singularities.  Think of a water drain; even after the whirlpool loses form, the water still swirls about as it goes down the drain, due to its centripetal motion.  Knowing the nature of gravity, why wouldn't singularities be able to attract to one another inside the 4-D frontier?  They already converge in regular 3-D space: sometimes on spectacular levels, like when the Supermassive black holes of two galaxies collide. 

In order for this theory to work, everything in the visible universe must be expanding on a sphere, like a balloon being blown up. Because we are on the surface, the interior dimension of hyperspace can't be seen.  We can't see it for the same reason that the world appears flat to us.  Inside this figurative balloon, hyperspace has a center, which is where the singularities would converge.  Perhaps a great many convergences triggered a second Big Bang, which may explain why the universe's expansion started accelerating 5 billion years ago.  A critical mass may have been reached during this time, like in a nuclear explosion.  The sudden displacement- one we'd have no chance of ever detecting- would be like an explosion inside the balloon of our hyperspace.  This could explain how dark energy came into the picture.  Dark energy wouldn't be anti-gravity so much as a property of space; that as the second Big Bang exploded inside our hypersphere, it's only natural that its surface would rip apart. 

Finally, there's the notion that perhaps the hyperspace inside our hyperspace may be causing that one to expand, and so on ad infinitum, in a lovely fractal that would look much like a domino effect.  The only problem in such a scenario is that if matter is always recycling itself in universes that are born from Big Bangs in hyperspheres, it wouldn't conserve all the energy lost in between explosions.  An accelerating universe would leave enormous amounts of energy outside the border of the new universe, like all the matter we see now.  As per the balloon analogy, what would happen to all this excess matter?  Would it become absorbed by each universe's boundary, or get ripped to shreds by dark energy outside them? 

At this point, I will leave such wild speculations for others to rack their brains with.  I'm not even totally sold on the idea.  To me, the idea that white holes- a black hole's mirror image- are doorways to other universes still makes more sense from a conservation of energy standpoint.  But the fractal hypersphere could very well be the truth; it is more symmetrical and elegant when seen from afar.  Rather than the chaotic scatterings of Black Hole portals leading into an infinite number of universes, the simplicity of a fractal hypersphere is very attractive.  The tragedy is that we may never know what really happens inside a black hole.  All this conjecture would ultimately prove pointless as it pertains to science.  We can't have the kind of insight Lucy did, but she may have been gracious enough to at least show us a fraction of the truth. 

Art Blitz

 Art is the most celebrated of cultural institutions, bringing to the world all that we've seen from painting, literature, poetry, cinema, theater, music, and so on.  What the artist wishes to express can best be described as an awakening to that which is beyond his or herself.  He or she does this by evaluating individual experiences and constructing them into worldly symbols for all their subjects to appreciate, whether the inspiration comes from historical or personal events, reflections on ideas, people of influence, or things of beauty in the natural world.  The painter paints what he sees, preserving on canvas a moment in time, or a surreal vision that couldn't stay in his head; the writer scribes what experience has gelled him into: a giver of information, a generator of imaginary places, or a poet who puts what a painter would have intended into words; the actor reaches deep into the shadows of his subconscious, so that he may immerse himself in the archetype that is needed for his role; the musician plays for the world what graceful arrangements of sound the world is capable of making, in order to enhance the emotional state of his condition. 

Art is the vessel which translates our inner most desires onto a display, so that others may identify with our dreams, and in so doing, preserve them through the centuries by igniting adaptations which build on themes that were born unto us when the phenomenon of culture first emboldened man to create works that symbolized his condition, his temperament, his uncertain place in the cosmos.  Art is a representation of our psyches put on paper to materialize the things in ourselves which we find too difficult to express in normal conversation, either because our ideas and feelings are so complex that we can't convey them at will, or because things are so beautiful that normal means of communication cannot do them justice.  Art is the process by which we infuse our divine inheritance with the real world, taking things that strike us as otherworldly and welcoming them into our own, thereby making the joy of creation an act of Providence that graces our souls with what gifts the gods provided us.  In turn this makes us greater beings, beings who can take the divinity of creation and give it to the hearts of men, which is why an artist has more of a right to feel like a god among his own kind than anyone else (yet he seldom does).  Art is the source, the summit, the sea of the soul, a cloud of latent memories in a storm of dreams.  It's the familiarity we left behind after we were cast unto the Earth in chains by the original sin of attaining selfhood. 

The ability of art to elevate the self beyond what it can merely see, over the hedges of certainty and into the mysterious beyond, allows us to momentarily loosen the binds that keep us tied to the real world, delighting us with an alternative view that may best be described as a religious experience.  For just as the mystics, prophets, and poets of proverbs were able to reach the source of existence via their enlightenment, artists do the same through their meditations on life.  By focusing on a single element of creation and bringing it forth into the world, they offer the same glimpses into the netherworld of the gods that the pious believe in and preach about.  To love a painting or a cathedral or a piece of music is to worship it, for it is a creation which has sprung from the same ingredients that God made the natural world with.  All art should be treated as such, as sacred objects of eternal worth. 

The Screen Inside the Mind

Somewhere in our brains there's an arrangement of neurons that allows us to project our thoughts onto a 2-dimensional "screen", which we perceive whenever we imagine something.  Scientists don't exactly know where these neurons are located yet, or how the brain processes imaginary images, but if we were to suppose that our brains are like computers, the extraction of any "file" should pull up a "document" resembling the memory that a certain neuron (or network of them) stores.  The information from this neuron(s) could be projected onto a "screen" of grid cells, which are arrangements of neurons in the brain that serve visual functions, such as interpreting the direction in which one is moving relative to the world around them. 

Memories and images from the subconscious, all of which are capable of manifesting themselves in dreams and activities like reading, must seep to the surface of our awareness through "channels" of neurons, which flash onto the screen like they came from a projector.  What's more, the dream state allows us to walk right into the scene on the screen, adding a third dimension to our imagination.  In this manner, the beginning of a dream is literally like stepping into the world inside a television or computer.  The "movie" of our thoughts suddenly becomes real, and we are no longer in control of it.  Once we're inside the dream, all kinds of ideas symbolized by emotional representations of memories draw forth from these neural channels. 

Our minds are so special; it's like we have an enormous database of movies that we're capable of wandering through while we sleep, each associated with a particular streaming of memories.  It's as if we had the power to cut up all our memories and paste them into different narratives, like the way an Incanter could in real life in the book Anathem*.  Each memory involved associates itself with the one before and after it, through some unconscious mechanism that seeks to preserve important lessons learned that day. 

The screen inside the mind is like a miniature version of the world we perceive with our regular eyes.  This begs the question: if there's a second screen inside us, which allows us to perceive memories and dreams, shouldn't there be an organ for interpreting such perceptions?  Many believe the pineal gland to be this third eye.  Descartes thought it was the center of the soul, where all our thoughts are formed**.  Unfortunately, he was chastised by many of his contemporaries for this theory, and there is no evidence that supports the pineal gland being a center of cognition.  However, it does play a pivotal role in sleep and dreams.  One wonders what Descartes would have thought about the discovery of melatonin, which might have brought more people around to his idea back in the 17th century.  It's the pineal gland that releases this hormone at night, allowing us to drift off into sleep once our circadian rhythm comes full circle.  For this reason, and other sorts of wild conjectures, the pineal gland has reached an almost mystical status in our modern age. 

The gland is thought to have evolved from a third eye that is still seen in reptiles today.  Also known as the parietal eye, it mainly acts as a photoreceptor and is much nearer to the surface of the face on reptiles.  Our pineal gland seems to have evolved so intricately from this eye that it might have developed its own way of seeing images that the brain creates.  If I had to bet on how the imagination works, I would say the thalamus, an organ which is located just above the gland and serves as a crossroads of all neural pathways in the brain, acts as the screen and the pineal gland as the third eye.  The thalamus would be supplying the grid cells for the pineal eye to interpret, much like the way a computer monitor or television receives electrical signals to illuminate pixels.  It wouldn't surprise me if these organs gain more eminence in the coming years as the cerebral theater of all our imaginary thoughts, especially in dreams. 

 

*In the book Anathem by Neal Stephenson, an Incanter is a person with the ability to change the past by slicing up narratives and re-arranging them in certain ways. It seems that our dreams reflect this same kind of power, although few of us are willing to accept that the astral plane is as real as the physical one.  Another obvious difference is that the Anathem Incanters could consciously re-arrange narratives, while our power is restricted to the subconscious.  Although there are a select few who can control their dreams consciously, a great majority of people cannot. 

 

**Other interesting speculations about the pineal gland can be found in Stanford's Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 

 

Benny and Sheila

There once was a boy who wanted to know everything.   During his free time, he could always be found in the library with his nose buried inside a book.  Nobody ever bothered him, because he was always so focused on what he was reading that they thought interrupting him would be an intrusion.  And they were right, the boy didn't want to be bothered.  He wanted as much time to himself as possible, so he could read all the books that would help him know everything there was to know; things about life, the world and all the things in it, even the depths of the ocean and the far reaches of space.   He never even wondered why they didn't talk to him.  That is, until the day Sheila did. 

"Excuse me, what are you reading?", she asked. 

Normally Benny would have been annoyed by the question, but when he looked at her, he suddenly forgot what he'd been reading about.  She had sandy-beach hair that twirled over her shoulders in pigtails, and big eyes that were farther apart from each other than any he'd ever seen.  Their hazel irises glowed brightly, matching a green dress and orange backpack.  Pools of freckles glittered off her cheeks, as if she'd been dusted by a sheet of tiny stars.   Such a sight was entirely distracting to Benny.  He had to get it out of his head. 

"Oh, it's nothing," he said, returning his eyes to the book. 

"The Never-Ending Story," she said. "Sounds like a good one!" 

Benny looked at her strangely.  "It's not The Never-Ending Story, it's the 2016 edition of the World Almanac." 

"Uh, what's an Almanac?", she asked. 

He looked at her like she wasn't from Earth.   "Not a story", he said, dryly. 

She looked confused.  After a moment of silence she asked, "If it's not a story, then why are you reading it?" 

"I have to know everything, so I can win Jeopardy! some day." 

"Wow!", she said.   "And that book has everything there is to know?" 

"Not exactly. It's just a bunch of tables and charts and short descriptions of things that matter." 

"Things that matter...", she repeated. 

"Things that matter, yes. What's the matter with you?", he asked, without trying to be funny. 

"Nothing's the matter," she replied. "I was just thinking about how sad it would be for someone to glance over lists of books without actually reading them, and foods without ever tasting them, movies without ever seeing them, musicians without ever hearing them, or events in history without knowing how they changed things, and all those other things a boy needs to know to be on Jeopardy!  Why, it would be like knowing everything, yet knowing nothing at all." 

No response came from Benny.  He sat there dumbfounded, maybe even entranced.  He had to confess that she had a point.  In the Almanac he'd been memorizing a chart of world capitals.  While he knew some of the landmarks in the cities listed, like Big Ben in London and the Acropolis in Athens, he hadn't ever seen them in person, and couldn't even describe what the ones he hadn't seen looked like.  All the knowledge he was amassing was empty, like The Nothing in the story she'd mentioned.  Yes: The Never-Ending Story.   Interesting how she'd thought he was reading it. 

"Well, if you had to know everything, what would you read?", he asked. 

"I can't read," she said right away, without any sense of shame.  Instead of looking embarrassed, she sipped from a packet of apple juice like it was nothing.” 

"Oh, I see, um...  Well, if you can't read, then what are you doing in a library?" 

"So many questions.  You really do like to know everything!" 

She hadn't answered him, and didn't say anything for several moments, so he went back to reading.   How peculiar this girl was, to be in a library without knowing how to read.   No wonder then that she didn't know what book he was reading.  Then why had she assumed it was The Never-Ending Story?   Benny found himself increasingly perplexed by this girl. 

"I came here because I don't want to know anything.   I suppose that if there were only one thing one needed to know, it would be love.  But I already have that.  Don't you, Benny?" 

"Love?"  Benny thought that was just silly.  She'd stolen that from a Beatles song, he was sure.  Or was it the philosophy of the Dalai Lama?  He tried not to laugh but couldn't help himself. 

"What's so funny?", she asked, with an expression of concern crossing her face. 

"Nothing, I'm sorry.  It's just that love can't teach you anything about the world, and it certainly can't get you onto a game show.  Sure, society needs it to function- if there weren't any love then it would all go under.  But it's essentially useless when studying something like biology." 

Sheila brightened up the moment he'd finished making his point.   "Oh, but Benny, you do need love to study.   Most who read about biology love the study of life, don't they?  And in your case, it's the love of books.   Bibliophilia.  So, you see, everyone who gathers information is doing it out of love." 

"Bibliophilia?  That's a big word for someone who says they can't read." 

"Hmmm, well I can't say I love books, seeing as I've never read one, but with a little help perhaps I would." 

Benny thought for a moment. He wanted to show her just how magical a book could be, with all the ways it could open your mind and take you on imaginary adventures.   If only there was a way to show this illiterate yet clearly intelligent girl the secrets that books possessed, it would bring him the greatest pleasure.  And then it dawned on him; there was a way! 

"I'll teach you, Sheila," he said. 

"Me!? Why me?" 

"A girl as smart as you shouldn't have to go through life without being able to read.   Not everyone who wanders into a library feels right at home, like you.   Why, it would be criminal of me not to offer." 

"Oh no, Benny, I couldn't.  That's very nice of you, but I would only slow you down." 

He knew it would interrupt his studies, but for once in his life it didn't matter to him.   She may have been a bit eccentric, but he was warming up to her quickly.  Besides, he'd read somewhere that people learned better when they were teaching something, as opposed to just reading about it.   

    After Benny insisted on teaching her to read, her face lit up with joy.  She hugged him outright and cried with glee, surprising him and everyone else in the library.  He thought she smelled nice, and not at all like it was an invasion of his personal space. 

"So umm, yeah, just pick a book to read.  I'll read it to you and explain what each word means." 

"Ok Benny, but we should go somewhere private, where nobody can see us.   I don't know want anyone to know... you know..." 

"Oh yes, of course." 

For the first time she looked uncertain of herself.  She didn't want anyone to know she couldn't read, meaning she was human after all.  That was the moment Benny fell in love. 

 

The first book she picked was Colorland by Betty Walters, a book that Benny hadn't read but had heard was good.  It had been in the Young Adult section, so he thought it wouldn't be too difficult of a book to teach someone to read. 

When he opened it and started reading to her, something magical happened.  They were both transported to the world inside the book.  It was a land that was full of blue things: blue skies, blue seas, beaches and rocks made from shards of sapphire, and mountains of cobalt that had fields of bluebells.  Even the clouds took the shade of a light blue color, as if the sky itself had penetrated their structure.  Blueberries grew on all the shrubs that lined the beach of gems.  In the ocean they saw hundreds of blue tang fish swimming about, searching for the cyano-plankton that caused the water to shine with a heartbreaking turquoise. 

Benny was dumbstruck for the second time that day, while Sheila didn't look fazed at all.  He knew very well that it wasn't possible to be physically transported inside the book one was reading, yet Sheila seemed to think it was perfectly natural.  She walked about as if she'd already been there before, making Benny wonder if she was some sort of witch girl who'd enchanted him with spells of love and magic. 

Off in the distance he spotted a city of coral that gleamed with seashells that were every color of the sea.  He continued reading and as he approached the city, he saw that there were hundreds of people crying in the streets.  He presumed that something terrible had happened, but after a while it seemed like people who had every reason to be happy were crying instead.  For instance, a girl who'd found an earring she lost picked it up and kept on crying like she'd been before.  Benny didn't need the book's explanation to figure out what was happening.  The people were blue in the metaphorical sense, and therefore they couldn't help but cry, even if they should've been happy. 

Sheila stopped and said we have to help them, but Benny pointed out that they weren't in the book so they couldn't interact with anyone.  All they could do was observe things as Benny read each word.  Sadly, she yielded and sat on the ground so he could teach her how to read the rest of the words. 

When the chapter was over, he closed the book and they were transported back to the library.  It was all so hard to believe.  Each word he'd read to her had materialized into something right in front of them. 

"Are you some kind of sorceress?", he asked. 

"No, but I have been called a source of unrest, whatever that means," she said. 

"That was the most remarkable thing that's ever happened to me," Benny said.  "A girl who creates imaginary worlds when being read to.  It's like what happens in the book you thought I was reading.  The Never Ending Story.  As Bastian was reading it, he came to find the world in the book really existed, and that he was reading his own story.  You must have known this would happen." 

    "I did, Benny," she said definitively.  "The whole point was to teach you something.  Experiencing something is far greater than reading about it.  If you really want to be on a game show, you need to go out and do things." 

    That was when a wild idea came to Benny's mind. 

    "You're absolutely right, Sheila.  But not entirely right.  If I read to you every single fact in every single book in this library, why, I really would know everything, because you'd show me all their realities with that sorcery of yours." 

    Sheila folded her arms and let out a laugh.  "Using me to know everything?  Now there's a thought." 

    "Well, I wouldn't be using you any more than you'd be using me.  You said you wanted to learn how to read.  Well, I'd be teaching you the same way you'd be teaching me!" 

    It was a mutual benefit, as love often becomes.  Sheila consented to the proposal.  Together they witnessed historical events without actually being in them, ate foods without really tasting them, saw movies without really seeing them, heard music without really hearing it, and met famous people without really meeting them.  As Sheila learned to read, she was able to transport herself to the worlds inside her head on her own, and Benny felt that he'd really experienced each fact he learned.  What he didn't anticipate was that Sheila had been right all along; as he grew to love her, he found that this love was more important than anything she'd shown him in all the books he'd read to her.  It was more important than all the trivial facts in this old world put together.  He grew to love her so much that he no longer cared to read for her in order to gain knowledge; he would only do it because he loved her and she enjoyed traveling with him in her mind. 

    After Sheila learned how to read and she no longer needed Benny, she kept reading all the books that he'd never read to her.  She read so much and saw so many things that her love of knowledge surpassed even that of Benny's.  

    Years later, she was the one who ended up trying out for Jeopardy!, and ended up winning millions on the show.  Many thought that Ken Jenning's streak of 74 straight victories would never be broken, until she came around.  Benny was in the audience for each of her 105 wins.  She was so beautiful, and a fan favorite in every sense, that for the first time America's Sweetheart had enough intelligence to complement her looks.  Young and beautiful women wanted to emulate her, so they studied harder and tried to look smarter in the eyes of men, for the men had been so enamored by Sheila's perfectionism that they sought the same in other women.  From Sheila and Benny's passionate thirst for knowledge there spawned a cultural revolution that changed the country; one that valued thoughtfulness in place of indifference and humanism in place of hedonism.