Math Moments – Expanding into Parallel Universes

Alright, this is where it starts getting really interesting. We started out saying that we can use the language of math to build universes, at least in our imagination. We started out with (1) one point in the whole universe. Since a point has no size, the whole universe was simply a 0-dimensional space (a bit mind blowing).

After thinking about nothing for a while, we then thought about having (2) two points in the universe. We argued the concept of distance between these two points. We imagined two distinct completely identical points separated by a distance, this is the origin of the concept of the number 2. We then discussed a way to build a whole 1-dimensional space of points, a line between the two points.

We said that we could fill in the points on a line between these two points by first creating a midpoint a distance half-way between these points then, including the midpoint, use the same concept to create more new points in the middle of these points, and so on forever filling in the gaps (a bit more mind blowing).

We realized that there are an infinite number of points that can fit between our original 2 points, each of them described by the distance and direction they are from the midpoint. We started finding other points to fill in all the gaps between points.

We introduced the concept of symmetry; for every point on the line, everything must look exactly the same in both directions. This symmetry concept required that every point on the line has the same arrangement of points in either direction. If we ever found a point where the line ends, we could just add another segment onto the empty direction and keep doing this forever. This complete infinite 1-dimensional space of points is called a “line” (oh, the things we can think).

We named the two directions in this 1-dimensional space to be “negative” and “positive”. We can now choose any of the points to be a reference point and describe the position of any point in this space by its distance and direction from the reference point. We have thus introduced the number line.

I hope you enjoyed this line of reasoning so far. We can now use the same line of reasoning we used to expand 0-dimensional space into 1-dimensional space in order to expand a 1-dimensional space into a 2-dimensional space.
As before, we only need to take the points we have in a 1-D space, on the line, and introduce another new point that is not in that space, not on the line. With this new point, we can now define another line by using this new point and any of the points on the original line to create a new line going in a different direction.

Since we can now create a distinct new line through the new point for every point on the original line, we have created an infinite array of new lines (1-D spaces) going off in different directions. Since the points on the original line can be infinitesimally close together, so are the lines. We include all the points on all these lines as part of a new 2-D space. We now have lots of points to connect together to form new lines. All these lines are said to live in this new 2-D space. An ancient mathematician, Euclid, studied these spaces, in honor of him, these “flat” spaces, of straight and parallel lines are called Euclidean spaces.

There are still some gaps. For example, there is a line that passes through the new point that is not connected to the original line, this line is said to be “parallel” to the original line, and since it never can cross the original line, it does not contain any of the points of the original line. As it turns out, building parallel lines using the tools we have requires a bit of doing.

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