Bubblesofearth wrote:ursaminortaur wrote:
There is no evidence that any embedding space exists or what properties it has if it were to exist. Hence Occam's razor (scientific parsimony) leads scientists to build their theories just based upon what we can measure from within the universe.
OK, but there is still a difference between saying there is no evidence for an embedding space and stating categorically that one doesn't exist. IMO it's especially important when dealing with concepts as complex and difficult to visualise as space-time. The analogies of spots on balloons and currents in cake break-down because the expansion of both does rely on the existence of an embedding space. Is there a better analogy, i.e. one that does not rely on an ES?
BoE
The only evidence we can gather is from within the universe. We can imagine embedding the universe in a higher dimensional space but that gains us nothing and without greater knowledge of the shape of the universe could be potentially very misleading. The first question would be how many extra dimensions should you add ? If you add one extra dimension then why stop there might not that 4d space be embedded in a 5d space ? *
Secondly is the embedding space a euclidean space or something else ?
You may think that you could always embed the universe in a euclidean space which is one dimension bigger but that isn't necessarily the case. For instance a Klein bottle is a two dimensional surface which cannot be embedded in 3d euclidean space ( but can be embedded in 4d euclidean space). And even if you can embed a surface in a larger euclidean space that embedding can cause distortions. So for instance embedding a flat torus in 3d euclidean space distorts distances compared with those you would measure intrinsically using the most natural metric.**
Similar problems would occur with the higher dimensional analogues of the Klein bottle and Torus which might conceivably correspond to the overall shape of our universe if it is finite.
* For this discussion I'm ignoring the time dimension.
**. Strictly speaking there is a way of embedding a flat torus in 3d Euclidean space whilst preserving distances (isometry) but it is a somewhat pathological solution which relaxes ideas of the smoothness of the surface. See
http://hevea-project.fr/ENPageToreDossierDePresse.htmlThe torus of revolution thus represents the square flat torus in tridimensional space. But this representation is far from ideal since it distorts distances. For instance, horizontals and verticals in the square flat torus all have the same length while this is not true for the corresponding latitudes and longitudes in the torus of revolution.
.
.
.
In 1954, John Nash while examining the isometric embedding problem in four dimensional space (or in spaces with even larger dimensions) finds an unexpected result: the obstruction to the existence of such embeddings — i.e., the curvature — can be bypassed... provided we pay the price! What price? We will shortly see. One year latter, Nicolaas Kuiper extends the work of John Nash to the case of the three dimensional space and he deduces a somewhat paradoxical consequence: there exist isometric embeddings of the square flat torus in ambient space. This is in total contradiction with what we have just seen above. How is it possible?.
.
.
The key point for resolving the apparent contradiction raised by John Nash and Nicolaas Kuiper is the following: if a surface is not regular enough then it becomes impossible to compute its curvature; in fact the very idea of curvature loses all meaning. That is precisely what is happening with surfaces of class C° and C¹ (in the above two first examples the curvature has no meaning along the connecting line). By contrast, the curvature is well-defined at every point of a surface of class C². For the square flat torus, its vanishing curvature prevents the existence of isometric embeddings with C² regularity. However, it does not obstruct the existence of an isometric embedding generating a surface of class C¹ only, as the curvature no longer exists for such an embedding... Indeed, John Nash and Nicolaas Kuiper show —inter alia— that isometric embeddings of the square flat torus in the ambient space do exist, but the counterpart, that is the price to pay, is that these embeddings belong to the class C¹ and can not be enhanced to belong to the class C². Surprisingly this price comes with a bonus, Nash and Kuiper prove that not only isometric embeddings in the class C¹ do exist but there are infinitely many.
.
.
.
The way John Nash and Nicolaas Kuiper demonstrate the existence of isometric embeddings is not amenable to visualization. We are faced with a frustrating situation: we know that there exist numerous surfaces with fascinating properties but we are unable to picture a single one!
.
.
.
Though as shown in the next part of the article you can using computers generate an approximate picture of the isometric embedding
Indeed, for the fifth corrugations wave, the amplitudes are so small that they are not visible to the naked eye. With this in mind, the pictures obtained at the fourth step really show an isometric embedding of the square flat torus in three dimensional space.