Читать книгу The Prime Network - Gerard G. Nahum - Страница 7

2 THE APPROACH

THE QUESTION EVERYONE HAD WAS HOW MR. GREGORY did what he did. When asked, he said that most people didn’t think about the underlying structure of space-time. They typically only cared about what they needed to know to get around and do things in their everyday lives. Ordinarily, they didn’t give the matter much more thought until they were forced to consider that the Earth was a sphere—for example, when they flew in airplanes or saw pictures taken from satellites. Then it became obvious that the structures analogous to straight lines were meridians and that parallel lines were actually curved.

During the twentieth century, the study of gravitational fields showed that the geometry of space was coupled to its distribution of matter and bundled together with time. But because nothing about everyday life made the curvature of space obvious, the implications were reduced to a few buzzwords and phrases such as black holes, E = mc2, and some unusual paradoxes related to gravity and relativity.

At about the same time, physicists were trying to develop a deeper understanding of reality by combining all the rules governing the design and evolution of the universe into a single model. To accomplish that, they considered complex space-time geometries to account for everything they could observe. Even so, a single theory of everything—a grand unified theory—was beyond their grasp, and the further away from ordinary experience their descriptions became, the more difficult they were to explain, in terms of common language and even mathematical abstractions. Not only did their esoteric theories leave ordinary people behind, but they left most of the scientific community behind as well.

Nevertheless, their investigations made one thing perfectly clear: the number of dimensions needed to explain everything was much greater than the four that humans knew about. Mr. Gregory realized that meant the shape of space-time had to be something very peculiar.

While other people considered a mathematical labyrinth of possibilities to arrive at a unified theory that would encompass everything, Mr. Gregory thought about things a bit differently. No matter how much the underlying geometry of space-time was curved, stretched, twisted, or partitioned, it could still be modeled as a network—a set of discrete points with connections between them. By viewing it in that way, a new understanding of reality could be uncovered. Mathematicians called such points nodes and the connections between them edges. By using only those two elements, any geometrical shape could be represented in any dimensionality.

In contrast to other scientists who were searching for a theory of everything, Mr. Gregory was interested in understanding the underlying fabric of space-time. That was what he needed to know to make sense of everything that happened by using network theory. However, to do that, he also needed to understand something else that was related to it: how information was transferred and processed within it.

To explain what he was thinking, he often used the analogy of a spiderweb. “Consider the way spiderwebs are structured,” he would say. “They have strands that extend out in all directions, and if any one of them is perturbed, the effects are relayed throughout the web. The energy from the disturbance is then distributed in a fashion that depends on the configuration of the web’s different strands and how they are connected to each other.

“The consequences of this are important. Whenever an individual strand is tugged, the energy imparted to it causes it to vibrate together with all the other strands connected to it. The structure of space-time can be thought of analogously: as a giant multidimensional spiderweb—one that spreads out over many dimensions in addition to the four we know about. Energy is distributed to its different regions when the connections between its nodes vibrate; those vibrations are what disperse the energy to particular parts of the web, moving it away from some regions while focusing it on others.”

Mr. Gregory also liked to use another more technical analogy to explain how space-time was structured that was man-made: the internet. The internet was a system of electronic linkages that connected computers together with a human interface called the World Wide Web. Although it was rudimentary by comparison, it served as a useful analogy because of the way it was designed and how it operated. It sent packets of information around via routers to certain locations where they were reassembled and had their effects, which generally involved delivering sets of instructions about how to execute specific tasks at particular places. The routers acted as the system’s nodes, and the communication channels between them served as its connectors.

Mr. Gregory used both analogies to explain how the fabric of space-time was structured, which he referred to as the Prime Network. Although the rules for its construction and evolution were simple, their iterative application over the eons had generated a system with a highly complex and convoluted topology, which was a reflection of its underlying geometric configuration.

Mr. Gregory liked to say, “Knowledge about the Network’s higher-dimensional distribution of information allows predictions to be made about what will happen in our four-dimensional space-time.” What he left out was that the key to making such predictions was not only being able to read its activity but also having an understanding of both its topology and the factors influencing the dynamics of the information transfer within it. Both were highly complex because of the way it was arranged: between any two nodes, there could be one or more connections, but there could also be none. In the latter case, there would be no direct way for the two nodes to communicate, although there might still be more circuitous routes available for information to be sent around to them via other nodes.

The next issue that Mr. Gregory had to tackle was to understand how such a network would operate. Because of its sheer size and scope, he reasoned that trying to analyze it directly would be an overwhelming exercise in futility. When he explained how it could be done otherwise, he said simply, “To analyze the Network successfully, you have to break it up into components. That way, it can be effectively modularized to make the analysis of its information transfer more tractable.”

His idea was analogous to what electrical and software engineers had done for years with electrical circuitry and computer programming: they’d designed modular components with certain input and output specifications that defined their functionalities, capabilities, and tolerances. It wasn’t that the information processing within the modules themselves was particularly simple—in fact, it could be extraordinarily complex. Rather, it was that their outputs could be predicted based on the inputs provided to them, regardless of the degree of sophistication of the internal operations that they performed. That gave each component the ability to be coupled to others to make larger systems, and those composites could then generate functionalities that reached far beyond what any of the individual components could do themselves.

Mr. Gregory was invited by a group of economists to give a presentation about how he had used the Network to become a successful investor. He told them, “You can think of the Network as a set of components, much the way that a human body might be viewed as a set of organs from a functional standpoint, without the need to account for all of the cells and molecules that make them up.

“By analyzing the Network’s structure and dynamics in that way—essentially by coarse-graining it into modules—it allows the information within it to be tracked as it’s transferred from one region to another, where it’s either dispersed or collected. The latter produces condensations that exert the greatest influence over what will occur moving forward. In the case of equities, it allows their future prices to be predicted accurately.”

Mr. Gregory’s great insight was that physical reality could be represented as a mesh of nodes and connectors in a higher-dimensional space. Some of those cut through the slice of the four-dimensional space-time that people perceived as the universe, which was where everyone operated routinely. However, people didn’t realize that what they could observe was only the tip of the iceberg—a small portion of a much larger system that mushroomed out in a multitude of dimensions and scales that they had no way of recognizing.

But even after Mr. Gregory realized that, he knew that he still needed to understand how the structure and dynamics of the higher dimensional Network were related to its manifestations in four dimensions. For that, his insight was that the Network’s distribution of information was projected as the equivalent of a holographic image onto lower dimensionalities. When asked, he agreed that was the correct way to view it.

“Yes, that’s it in principle,” he said. “The idea is that the distribution of information in the higher-dimensional Network underpins all of the occurrences that we recognize here in four dimensions, and for that it is projected as an image onto our more compact four-dimensional space-time.”

He prided himself on his artistic abilities, and he pulled out a sheet of paper to draw a sketch to help make his point.

“What it means is that if you want to know where things are heading in our portion of the universe, all you need to do is look at which clusters of nodes are becoming active within the higher-dimensional Network. That will tell you.”

Then he went on to describe the Network’s overall structure. “The best way to think about it is that it is a network of networks. If you know enough about its topology and the information-transfer dynamics among its various components, you can get a good idea of what the effects of those various relationships and exchanges will be when they’re projected onto our compacted four-dimensional space-time, which constitutes everything that we know, experience, and care about.

“The exciting thing is that you can identify the changes in the Network’s higher-dimensional space before they become manifest in our four dimensions. That provides an opportunity to either learn what will happen in advance or modify what is about to happen by introducing changes into the Network to redirect what its outputs will be.”

Mr. Gregory’s explanation addressed the Prime Network’s structure and how it functioned, but he left one thing conspicuously absent: What, precisely, was necessary to read it? Moreover, even after that was accomplished, how could the dynamics of its information transfer be altered to make things happen differently, including in other reduced dimensionalities such as our own? Exactly how Mr. Gregory did that—and what tools he used to accomplish it—was left unsaid.