WHEN MR. GREGORY WAS A MERE UNIVERSITY STUDENT known as Roger, he could never have imagined himself earning accolades from the president of the United States. It all started because of some inconsistencies in what he was being taught, especially when it came to science. He tried to get clarifications from his instructors, but several things still didn’t seem right by the time he finished his training.
Two examples bothered him the most. The first was the idea of so-called quantum entanglement. It seemed that whenever two particles interacted and then separated, they both “knew” about the other’s state despite no longer being able to communicate. Even as great a luminary as Albert Einstein had been incredulous that it could occur, and he’d referred to it disparagingly as “spooky action at a distance.” The second was referred to as wave-particle duality. It seemed that radiation could adopt the characteristics of waves or particles, and it could actually be both. The two manifestations appeared to be fundamentally different, yet they could both occur at the same time.
To Mr. Gregory, the two phenomena were more than just anomalies; they were evidence that there was an inconsistency lurking in the background of people’s view of reality that couldn’t be bridged, at least within the framework that he’d been taught. The only conclusion he could draw was that the understanding that people had of reality in four dimensions—three of space and one of time—was inadequate to describe the full extent of the reality they were part of.
To get a better grasp of what the issues were, Mr. Gregory studied the works of scientists who proposed that there were extra dimensions beyond the four recognized by humans. In support of the idea, a construct arose during the twentieth century known as string theory, which evolved into superstring theory and further into M-theory. In all three, infinitesimal vibrating structures were used to explain the origin of the energy and forces that existed in four-dimensional space-time. However, for the theories to be consistent, there needed to be a minimum of eleven dimensions, not only the four that everyone knew about. So where were the others?
Most physicists thought that they were very tiny so that they were wrapped up tightly into themselves below the threshold at which they could be detected. However, there was also another idea: that at least one of them was very large so that it existed beyond the level where it would be noticed but still generated forces that wrapped around the other dimensions. Either way, the extra dimensions were there; it was just that the methods for detecting them hadn’t been developed yet.
That was what led Mr. Gregory to his theory. He reasoned that if there were eleven dimensions and only four of them could be recognized, then everything that people knew about was essentially a projection of what was occurring in a larger dimensional space. If so, the reality everyone had access to was only an image that was focused down on four dimensions, making it the equivalent of a holographic representation of what existed in the larger dimensionality. The signals that emanated from there were observed in the “flatter” window of four dimensions as either entangled groups of photons or photonic sequences.
Mr. Gregory realized that in order to make sense of what could be observed in four dimensions, he needed to have a “reverse lens” that would allow him to look out at the structures and relationships that existed in the larger dimensionality of the Network. The lens had to be able to tease apart the information that overlapped in the four-dimensional representations of what existed in a way that would decompose the interference patterns that arose from their composite overlays. In that way, their original configuration in the higher-dimensional space could be reconstructed and reverse-read.
Mr. Gregory worked diligently until he developed a lens that could detect the full array of patterns and sequences of photons with energies that spanned the entire range of the electromagnetic spectrum. But that was only the first step.
Even though his lens allowed him to re-create what occurred in the higher-dimensional space, Mr. Gregory knew that his understanding of it still fell short of what he needed. In order for him to interpret the signals that he identified successfully, the patterns needed to be grouped according to their energy, direction, polarization, and timing. What appeared initially as white noise was actually a mixture of patterns that reflected the information being transferred between the nodes of the higher-dimensional Network.
The analysis of the patterns became an exercise in big-data interpretation that had never been attempted before. The amount of data involved dwarfed what the most powerful computers had ever tried to process previously. Then Mr. Gregory made a mental leap: he realized that the only thing he could tell about the larger dimensional system was that there were discrete packets of information traversing it. Accordingly, he reasoned that the connections between the Network’s nodes would become apparent in four dimensions whenever he could detect signals from the Network in any type of a cluster or sequence. When he took that approach, he recognized something remarkable: the Network contained representations of the four-dimensional physical reality that everyone knew, but they were distinctly different from photographic images. Rather, they were arranged in a convoluted hierarchy of structures with different degrees of stability and intensity that were mapped to the objects and events that occurred in four dimensions in a variety of complex ways.
He then went on to link the structures and information densities of what he identified in the higher-dimensional Network to what occurred in four dimensions. He did that by adding them in as inputs to his pattern-reconstruction machinery so that the four-dimensional objects and events could be correlated with their higher-dimensional representations. However, he found that he was able to do it only if they were reasonably closely related; the farther away they were, the fuzzier the relationships and their associated information densities became and the longer it took to identify them. While he could still make out some of the more distant nodes that were linked to the objects and events in four dimensions, it was difficult to elucidate anything more about their details. Moreover, the farther away the origins of the overlapping signals were, the less well the order of their sequences could be distinguished.
A few days later, Mr. Gregory woke up after a fitful night’s sleep with a revolutionary thought: What if the higher-dimensional Network represented the equivalent of both the information, or the “data,” and the structure, or the “programming,” to generate everything in existence? If so, it would mean that the Network encoded for not just the underlying information of everything that existed but also for the dynamics that governed all of their trajectories as well. That sum total of information would define not only everything in the universe but also the entire universe’s evolution.
To investigate that possibility, Mr. Gregory invented a new information-processing paradigm that he called the Language of Inner Forced Evolution, or LIFE for short. This revolutionary new analytical system was able to parse the interference data from his lens by converting the photonic signals into the equivalent of clusters and sequences that could be interpreted as four-dimensional objects and events. Once he had the system working, he automated it so that its analyses could be performed in nearly real time. Then he could watch the representations of the four-dimensional universe as they evolved in the higher-dimensional Network—just like a dubbed movie.
Nevertheless, despite the efficiency of his machine’s operation, there was an important constraint he had to accept: the information he received through the lens required time to process, so it could never be interpreted instantaneously. That meant that the transient nature of objects and events—as reflected by the Network’s ongoing evolution—always occurred on a faster time scale than he could know about. The consequence was that no matter how much he might improve the processing speed of his device, he would still need to make predictions about where the Network’s states were headed. Nevertheless, the faster his device could analyze the information it received through his lens, the closer its interpretations would get to what was about to happen—both in other places and in the future. That was valuable because predictions were always easier to make—and more accurate—when they were closer rather than longer range.
In the next phase of Mr. Gregory’s experiments, he went beyond the passive observation of information in the higher-dimensional Network.