From Wally Sewell, London, UK
In your look at the possibility of extra dimensions, Georges Obied says: “There’s no reason why it has to be three. It could have been two; it could have been four or 10 (13 July, p 32).”
I wonder whether we can look to the anthropic principle as to why we have at least three dimensions?
It might be a fair assumption that for “observers” such as us to arise, information processors, such as brains, must evolve, and that a likely form for these is logical networks, whereby each node can be connected to any number of others. In two dimensions, to permit connections to all other nodes, connectors – such as synapses or wires – must cross each other. Some sort of gate mechanism, akin to a railway level-crossing, would have to evolve to allow this. Not impossible, but a bit of an engineering challenge!
Could it be that we exist in a three-dimensional universe because three is the minimum number of dimensions in which sentience can easily evolve?
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