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Comment by mkrecny | Hacker News Reader

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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If I recall correctly, the dimensions of the early universe in these kinds of models depends on counting the degrees of freedom of the universe. At high energies, everything becomes an internal degree of freedom, hence the universe behaves two dimensional (space + time). At lower energies, more dof shift from internal to external and the universes behaves multidimensional.

It's a similar pov to 11D supergravity for example. Since 7dimensions are so small, the look like internal dof. The huge added advantage is that gravity simplifies below 4 dimensions and the incompatibilities between GR and quantummechanics disappear.

I'll try to use this bad analogy. Suppose you see a high speed train passing (high E), the people in train would seem to move at high speed aswell from left to right. If a slow train passes, you'll see they'll also move from the far side of the aisle to your side and perhaps from the upper level to the lower level. So you 1D high E train becomes 3D low E.

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

Complexity - The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos by M. Mitchell Waldrop

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

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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