I was just over at youtube watching an interesting video titled “Visualizing 11 Dimensions.” The video attempts to demonstrate how to think about a concept popular in physics, that the world is made up of more dimensions than the three spatial dimension (and one of time) that we see around us. Frankly, I still struggle with the idea after watching the video.

The video lecturer, Thad Roberts, turns out to have a personal history almost as interesting as his ideas. Intellectually gifted he went to work as an astrophysicist as Nasa. Then…

At age 25 Thad fell in love with a bril­liant and beau­tiful Biology intern at NASA. Wanting to give her­ the moon (lit­er­ally), Thad mas­ter­minded the infa­mous moon rock caper and made off with lunar sam­ples. 33 years to the day after Neil Armstrong first picked up a piece of the moon, Thad sold some of those pieces and landed in the middle of a gov­ern­ment sting.

Thad was sen­tenced to 100 months in fed­eral prison for his actions. Though he would never repeat those acts, Thad doesn’t regret how things turned out. Despite the iso­la­tion, lone­li­ness, and hard lessons that defined those years, he notes that without that time of intense ded­i­ca­tion and con­stant focus he may have never dived so deeply into ques­tions about the con­struc­tion of our Universe. After coming face to face with his own inse­cu­ri­ties, Thad decided to over­come the odds of his past mis­takes and to once again strive for his dreams. His days in prison were spent teaching, exer­cising, wrestling with the mys­teries of modern physics, and exploring new axiomatic assump­tions that might explain them.

Thad left prison with some­thing more valu­able to him than a safe full of moon rocks – a man­u­script over 700 pages long that lucidly describes how he was led to a new geo­metric axioms for the struc­ture of space­time. The result was quantum space theory (qst), a spe­cific form of super­fluid vacuum theory (SVT), which now stands as a can­di­date for the theory of quantum gravity.

As a side note, I’ll point out one aspect of Robert’s ideas that interests me. I generally tout the belief people are deterministic, that free will does not exist. My general reason, summarized in a sentence, is that our thoughts and actions arise from the firing of our neurons and those neurons are subject to the deterministic laws of classical physics. Critics of this idea often point to the seemingly indeterminate nature of quantum physics as a way out of this challenge. Robert’s view, as I understand it, is that quantum behaviors that appear to be random to our eyes, are in fact determinist when understood as part of a world with more than four dimensions.