This experiment started out as innocent enough. I was reading a paper from the Journal of Theoretical Physics titled “The continuity of spacetime manifolds as it relates to common objects.” Okay, physics was never my strong suit—I did get a PhD in molecular biology, after all. But the concept behind spacetime manifolds hooked me.
If you simplify the idea enough so that I don’t get physics PhDs throwing test tubes at me, it goes like this: Instead of imagining objects as three-dimensional things that exist through time, we should imagine objects as four-dimensional entities that exist through space and time together.
Scientists call these four-dimensional slices of spacetime “worldtubes.”
Cool, right? It sounded cool to me too, until about three days ago when things took a turn for the weird.
“I’m just going to try thinking four-dimensionally today,” I told Mei as she watched me mark up the physics paper at 2 A.M. “See how it feels. Process objects as entire worldtubes instead of fixed entities.”
She gave me that look.
You know the one. It’s the look that says, “this is going to end with fire or me receiving a phone call from an institution.” Then she sighed. “Jamie, what happened last time you tried thinking like a slime mold for a week?”
“That was different!” I argued.
“This isn’t altering my biology, I’m just shifting my conceptual perspective! It’s not even hard, it’s just seeing reality a little differently.”
“You covered our bathroom in oatmeal mascaroni so you could study the mysteries of astute fungal digestion and nutrient transport,” she said, shutting her laptop. “Sure, okay, go splash around in weirdness.
But please update me on how reality works.”
Day one was exciting! I started off the morning thinking about my coffee cup as a four-dimensional object. I tried seeing the coffee not just as this cup with liquid in it, but as an entity that extended all the way back to where the coffee beans were grown—in Ethiopia, probably?—and forward to wherever it is coffee goes when it leaves your body.
(Fun fact: scientists have studied what happens to coffee when it leaves your body. All of existence is in the study papers, apparently.) In this view, my coffee is one continuous thing moving through space and time.
Right now, its worldtube intersects with my worldtube in the coffee shop. Exciting preliminary results: I spent the rest of the day trying to picture everything as a four-dimensional object. My phone wasn’t just a phone sitting on my desk.
My phone was a worldtube that extended all the way back to when somebody mined the rare earth minerals that make the phone function. It extended through the reality of factory workers in Shenzen to where my phone currently sits on my desk. It will extend through my phone’s future and into the facility that takes apart all our electronic devices when we’re done with them.
Every object around me had this lengthy existential history happening simultaneously. Day one was going great until lunchtime rolled around and I showed up at the restaurant before Josh did. And by showed up, I mean sat at our table waiting for him.
So I called him. “Where are you?” I asked when he picked up. “At the restaurant,” Josh said.
“Where we’re supposed to be meeting?”
“That’s where I am too!” I looked around, our table was half-full with untouched food and menus. “Isn’t that where you are?”
Long pause. “Jamie, what day is today?”
I checked my phone.
“Thursday.”
Josh groaned. “We made lunch plans for Friday. Tomorrow.”
“Oh.
Right.” I stared blankly at my phone. “I guess I was thinking of today as the specific day we’d eat lunch and didn’t realize that actually makes Friday, um, today.”
“Have you been experimenting on yourself again?” Josh has known me since we were overgrown puppies in grad school together. He can smell funhouse-mirror-world whenever I start tinkering.
“Sort of!” I answered, bubbling with irrational excitement. “I’m trying to think of everything as existing in four-dimensional space-time instead of three.”
This may or may not have been when things took a turn. Things got weird that night.
I wanted to look up something on my laptop, which meant I needed my charger. I used my laptop all the time. I know I had had it sitting on my desk at some point, because I just use it plugged in all the time.
But I couldn’t find it. “I swear I just had my charger here somewhere!” I called up to Mei as she worked at her desk downstairs. “I think you left it in the kitchen,” she said without looking up.
“You were making that ice melting timelapse earlier.”
I checked the kitchen. Nothing. The bathroom.
Closet. Under my bed. I opened every drawer in my apartment, looked inside every container.
My charger was gone. Do you know how frustrating it is to literally know that something is in your house, but have zero clue where? It’s unspeakably frustrating!
My brain kept trying to picture my charger’s worldtube going from me plugging it into the outlet earlier that day, to sitting on my desk, to wherever I had traveled with it since then. But instead of asking myself “where did I last place it?” which is what you’re supposed to do when you lose something, I kept trying to visualize my charger’s journey through my apartment over the last several hours. “It has to still be connected to where it was,” I muttered to myself, pacing around my apartment trying to track the imagined worldlines of objects as they moved through my apartment like a low-budget Roy Blatty.
“Where it was just a few seconds ago is still a part of where it is now in spacetime…”
I looked for that charger for THREE HOURS. I legitimately spent hours losing my charger because my brain couldn’t latch onto the simple concept of “where is it now?” everything just keeps… happening. At one point, Mei walked downstairs to find me lying facedown on our kitchen floor, eyes closed.
“What are you doing?” she prodded me in the shoulder. “I’m visualizing my charger’s worldtube,” I told her. “If I can understand its four-dimensional reality from when it was manufactured to this very second, I can locate its current three-dimensional positioning within space.”
She stared at me in silence for a minute, letting me bask in the horrifying glory of my own intellect.
Finally, she walked back upstairs to her desk, grabbed my charger out of her bag, and plopped it down on my head. “You left your charger on my desk yesterday,” she said. “I was charging my tablet and forgot to put it back.”
Day two wasn’t much better.
I got to the grocery store and just stopped walking. Shopping, I realized suddenly, was the ultimate test of four-dimensional perception. Everything in the store wasn’t just existing at that one moment, it was existing through time.
That tomato had come from a flower. That flower turned into a tomato because bees did their thing and planted seeds. That tomato traveled through several supply chains and probably surviveditives before ending up in the grocery cart I pushed down the vegetable isle.
Every vegetable was its past and future self happening at once. Twenty minutes and a half-full cart later, an employee pulled me aside to see if I was okay. “Um, sir?
Are you feeling okay?” He glanced at the zucchini I was still firmly holding. “Would you like me to call security?”
I left without any groceries. Today marks day three of thinking of objects as worldtubes.
I lost my keys. My wallet. My phone (temporarily).
My favorite mug. Both of my slippers (at different points in time). And for a few minutes there, my mind.
Thinking of every object around you as a complex web of spacetime makes it extremely difficult to remember where you placed that object in three-dimensional space. Why? Because when you think about things in four-dimensional space, they aren’t where they “are” they’re where they “where.”
Mei grounded me tonight after she found me trying to tape index cards to every object in our apartment with its projected worldtube path (“LOOKS LIKE IT TRAVELS FROM HERE TO HERE TO HERE”).
“Jamie, you need parameters on this experiment,” Mei sighed, walking into our kitchenette. “You can’t four-dimensional map your sh*&* whenever you try to find something.”
“I can and it’s glorious!” I countered while grabbing a label maker from our pantry. “We are just preconditioned to see the world as three-dimensional that we forget everything we’re experiencing is happening to everything else too!”
She ripped the label maker out of my hands.
“First of all, that sentence didn’t make any sense. When did you last sleep?”
It had been a while. Turns out, four-dimensional thinking also messed up my sleep schedule.
How am I supposed to sleep when I keep picturing my body as a worldtube? Instead of seeing myself sitting in bed, my mind transforms it into me just sort of… happening in bed. There I am, staring at the ceiling thinking “oh look, I’m sleeping in bed right now” but what I’m actually doing is existing from birth to death in bed.
You try sleeping on that brain-melter. But yesterday was where it all crashed down. I had a Skype call with my editor about this very column.
I sat down at my desk, five minutes early, fully ready to tell her how thinking of objects as worldtubes instead of things was going to revolutionize our understanding of reality. Except I couldn’t find my desk. Well, of course I could find my desk.
I know my desk was here, I was sitting at my desk! But my brain kept insisting that I couldn’t find the three-dimensional object my desk became when it intersected with my current position in space-time. My desk had been cut from a tree.
That tree existed in an ikea warehouse before coming here. It’s existed in several configurations around my apartment and now my mind was trying to hack me out of knowing where my desk sat because I kept picturing every possible version of my desk existing simultaneously. My brain got me so lost in thought I found myself sitting on the floor typing this email to my editor with my laptop propped in my lap.
“So you lost your mind and can no longer locate your belongings?” She summarized as I gave her a more-than-five-minute exposition of spacetime. “No, I know where everything is,” I typed back emphatically. “I know my keys are sitting perfectly comfortably within my house right now.
I just can’t interact with the three-dimensional pieces of my life.”
Long silence. “This is a good angle for a column. Just… please sleep before you write it?”
Object as Fixed Entities: 1 Four-Dimensional Madness: 0.
TLDR—I’ve been trying to think of every object around me as a four-dimensional object instead of a constant. While I now have a greater appreciation for reality and a stronger understanding that trees were once just flowers, I also lost my keys, my wallet, and the ability to locate my bathroom without hallucinating that I’m going to China. The moral of the story: The universe is not made of objects that travel through time, it’s made of events that stretch through space-time.
Human beings are not three-dimensional animals moving through a timeline.
We are four-dimensional beings who already have lived and will live our entire lives. We just happen to experience that existence one moment at a time.
Apparently, I can no longer locate objects that exist at one moment at a time. If you can’t find me, I’ll be using four-dimensional thinking to find my keys. I’m sure they are somewhere.∃x(Kx) As I’m sure we all are, somewhere in space-time.
I just need to figure out where that ‘where’ is.
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