Dimensionisation

All hinges on the definition of dimensions in the model and the real world. The ant walking around the orange may know about its local up and down, without realising that the straight line it is walking is not really straight but is curving gently forever downwards. It is too busy not veering to left or right to wonder about the meaning of its horizon. But the local 'down' and the horizon 'down' are the same dimension, the 3rd after#1) left-right and #2) front-back.

So as with our toroid, its invention by taking the cylinder of the rotating rubber belt, and joining the ends of its axis, is just the macro version of a dimension in which a piece of the cylinder exists in.

This is a trick, because the premise of discovering the 3rd dimension was that the ant lives in a 2D world, we have a "number of dimensions" ambiguity.

Having scotched pseudoscience, alchemy (sorry Sir Isaac), astrology and general expedient guessing, I still have to mention barmy ideas because they are the origins of out-of-the-box thinking. They include:

- Our development of logic has to put things in neat boxes, eg each dimension is distinct, whereas in reality the edges between one dimension and the next may be blurred. After all, matter and energy are connected by the shady wave-particle duality. And the computers of our brains are soft and sludgy, not a set of straight lines and switch nodes as our computers still are.

- Space as a medium, or "ether" was disproved by Newton and many after him, yet energy travels through 'something', and masses interact at a distance through nothing but space. The basis of my wondering about the shape of the universe is the dual impossibility of existence, and non-existence, and my barmy thought of the month (May 2009 AD) is that space is the realisation of the tension (I will think of a better word) between these two impossible conditions. (I keep recalling thhgttu "Improbability Drive" but I consider that to be more humour than sense, and my 'reconciliation of impossibilities' concept is independent and unconnected to good old Douglas Adams, bless him.)

- The rotation of space creating its distortion by the masses it is constantly accelerating, relates directly to the dimension of time. What a huge conundrum though, to our linear minds, to grasp the start and end of time as the same thing.

Yes these are pseudoscience (if that!), but alchemy led Newton towards real science so we shouldn't be knocking things out of court too soon.

I came to the toroid shape without knowing how cosmologists got to theirs. If the amateur model works in this case, maybe it can work in others. I need to find what cosmologists think space is - in terms that I might understand. But time - I don't expect anyone to have worked that out. It will have to wait till June . . .