Fantasy setting with 4D magic

Ideas about how a world with more than three spatial dimensions would work - what laws of physics would be needed, how things would be built, how people would do things and so on.

Fantasy setting with 4D magic

Postby samdkatz » Sat Nov 10, 2018 2:17 am

Hello. You are all smarter than me, which is why I'm here. This is going to be a weird question, and I'm not sure if this is the right forum, but I think you are the right people. I am working on a fantasy setting in which the following list of things is true, and I am looking for some help brainstorming / drawing out the natural conclusions.

1. There is a fourth spatial dimension, but the story is set on an Earth-like planet in a 3D universe, populated by (mostly) 3D organisms.

2. Though mostly 3D, organisms in this universe have "minds" that extend slightly into the "planes" adjacent to the main world, in both 4D directions. These "minds" are generated by the brains and made of let's call it magical energy. Extreme mental states, notably the moment of death, cause a lot of energy to leak into the two 3D planes on either 4D side of the main plane.

3. The two 3D planes on either 4D side of the main plane are home to energy-based organisms. The exact biology here will involve a decent amount of handwaving, as it's not the point. All we need to know is this:

    there are something like plants that float around, consuming energy in order to sustain themselves. Through intense concentration, the intelligent species of material life can use the 4D projections of their minds to sense and even shape these creatures. They are essentially (very simple) analog computer programs, able to take a certain type of input (usually a mental state) and produce a certain output (an illusion, an electric shock, some other form of energy). Importantly, these creatures can transfer energy between their own world and the main/material plane, and these effects can be harnessed by material people in the material world. These creatures are called spells.

    harnessing certain types of spells allows a person to achieve astral projection into what they call the spirit world, and even more spells allow their spirits to affect the material world invisibly (although they cannot wander too far from their meditating body).

4. There exist large, 4D creatures, who span a much larger area than just the 3 aforementioned 3-planes. These are called "gods" and from time to time mess around with the material world, which is one of the most dynamic 3D planes they occupy (think of the relatively 2-D ant farm mounted on a wall).[/list]

I'm trying to come up with a list of plausible spells. That is, a type of energy transfer/transformation from an invisible world to the visible world, along a fourth axis, to make something extraordinary happen. How much energy (which would come from the chemical energy stored in a caster's body) would it take to cast these spells? What would not be possible?

What would the gods be capable of? What would they be incapable of?
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Re: Fantasy setting with 4D magic

Postby PatrickPowers » Mon Nov 12, 2018 1:51 am

samdkatz wrote:Hello. You are all smarter than me, which is why I'm here. This is going to be a weird question, and I'm not sure if this is the right forum, but I think you are the right people. I am working on a fantasy setting in which the following list of things is true, and I am looking for some help brainstorming / drawing out the natural conclusions.

1. There is a fourth spatial dimension, but the story is set on an Earth-like planet in a 3D universe, populated by (mostly) 3D organisms.

2. Though mostly 3D, organisms in this universe have "minds" that extend slightly into the "planes" adjacent to the main world, in both 4D directions. These "minds" are generated by the brains and made of let's call it magical energy. Extreme mental states, notably the moment of death, cause a lot of energy to leak into the two 3D planes on either 4D side of the main plane.

3. The two 3D planes on either 4D side of the main plane are home to energy-based organisms. The exact biology here will involve a decent amount of handwaving, as it's not the point. All we need to know is this:

    there are something like plants that float around, consuming energy in order to sustain themselves. Through intense concentration, the intelligent species of material life can use the 4D projections of their minds to sense and even shape these creatures. They are essentially (very simple) analog computer programs, able to take a certain type of input (usually a mental state) and produce a certain output (an illusion, an electric shock, some other form of energy). Importantly, these creatures can transfer energy between their own world and the main/material plane, and these effects can be harnessed by material people in the material world. These creatures are called spells.

    harnessing certain types of spells allows a person to achieve astral projection into what they call the spirit world, and even more spells allow their spirits to affect the material world invisibly (although they cannot wander too far from their meditating body).

4. There exist large, 4D creatures, who span a much larger area than just the 3 aforementioned 3-planes. These are called "gods" and from time to time mess around with the material world, which is one of the most dynamic 3D planes they occupy (think of the relatively 2-D ant farm mounted on a wall).[/list]

I'm trying to come up with a list of plausible spells. That is, a type of energy transfer/transformation from an invisible world to the visible world, along a fourth axis, to make something extraordinary happen. How much energy (which would come from the chemical energy stored in a caster's body) would it take to cast these spells? What would not be possible?

What would the gods be capable of? What would they be incapable of?


I have had similar fantasies. Maybe I can help.

You can call them "spells" if you want, but I find it confusing. A spell is more like hypnosis, a mental block that prevents someone from doing something or a suggestion that compels them to do something. What you are talking about are more like demons. Today this word has unfortunate negative connotations so you can't use that either. They are too unsophisticated to be called spirits. It doesn't match any medieval concept I know of, so you might be better off inventing a new word. They are like little living machines. Maybe the successful ones evolve into your demigods. Hmmm, you could have microgods and demigods. I'd reserve "god" for the Big Kahuna.

If you want to be hip and with it -- surely good things -- then you might go with the Ads/CFT correspondence. This is the big 1997 breakthrough in string theory. I don't have the time right now to do a careful job, but can do a sloppy one on the spot. The basic idea of string theory is that mathematical arguments strongly point toward there being 11 dimensions, the 3+1 (3D + time) that we are used to and 7 more that are not observable for some reason. (What I am sluffing over is that I don't know how time fits in here. I'm curious and would like to find out, but right now I'm going to pretend it doesn't matter and ignore it.) The world of the 7 dimensions is hyperbolic. That means that a very large amount of stuff can fit in it even though to us it is too small to detect. A space of this type is called an "anti-deSitter space."

The Ads/CFT correspondence is a one-to-one correspondence between our world and this anti-space. Some calculations are much easier in anti-space. So string theorists convert their problem into anti-space, do their calculation, then convert the result back into our space. It works. There is a good chance that this anti-space actually exists. So your microgods and demigods could live there.

In my sloppy job I'm not ready to figure out what our world would look like to them. Would our world appear to be small or large to them? I don't know, so I'll be wild and say that our Universe is a 3+1 fractal embedded in 7+1 anti-space. That means that our Universe can fit into a rather small space, even if our Universe is infinite. That means that we could be very close to some star a centillion light years away, or many such stars.

So how much energy to do this? I like to think that Plank's constant is the answer. Every interaction between matter and energy has to have a certain minimum amount of energy. This minimum isn't a constant, it depends on geometry. Paradoxically, if things are very close together, like in an atomic nucleus, then that minimum energy is very high. If they are far apart, the minimum is very low, not even noticeable. In any case, this minimum always reminded me of sparks. When you plug in or turn on a powered-up electrical device, there is always a spark. The electricity won't wait for the two conductors to touch, it will always (I think) jump the gap before actual contact is made. (This is called "hot switching." It can damage equipment, so it is avoided.) So you could say that this quantum phenomenon is due to jumping the gap between space and anti-space. Indeed, you could say that ALL energy is in anti-space. There is a spark when it jumps over there and another spark when it jumps back. I think that that makes a lot of sense. It could even possibly be true :-).

Then it would make sense for the residents of anti-space to be completely composed of energy. They could be knotted vortexes of energy. Such vorticies actually exist, though they haven't been studied much. If the knotted vortex has the minimum amount of energy then it can be quite stable. It is said that it has "one quantum" of energy. It isn't possible for it to have less energy and still exist, so such things can be surprisingly stable, especially in anti-space where there is no matter to interfere with it. They would be even more stable because there is no matter in anti-space to absorb them or otherwise cause trouble. There would be much less entropy (undesirable, degrading randomness) in such a place. Energy doesn't degrade there. Even in our Universe, light can pass through 13 billion light years without degrading at all, as long as it doesn't encounter matter.

Make them immortal if you like. Quantum objects can exist forever, they just can't DO anything in that state. To effect any sort of change in anything -- that includes thinking -- they need to use energy. But it might not be that much. Consider the enzyme. Enzymes are a lot like what you have in mind. They cause chemical reactions with very little energy. That's what makes life more efficient than a machine. I'll tell you more about that if you like later.

So "absorption and emission of photons" is actually stuff jumping the barrier between space and anti-space. Bosons live in anti-space while fermions live in space. So I guess your microgods could be called Bose algea, Bose trees, Bose flowers, etc. It works pretty well in a poetic sense too. Bose was a peaceful guy while Fermi invented the hydrogen bomb. Also, look in Autobiography of a Yogi where Yogananda talks about a different Bose who made some interesting devices back in 1930 or so. Bose made very sensitive devices that measured strange energies of plants. I always wondered about that. That ought to be perfect for you.
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Re: Fantasy setting with 4D magic

Postby samdkatz » Sat Nov 17, 2018 1:02 am

Wow. Thank you so much for this response. I really enjoy it, and I want to respond to some things specifically. Hopefully my responses yield more responses.

PatrickPowers wrote:You can call them "spells" if you want, but I find it confusing. A spell is more like hypnosis, a mental block that prevents someone from doing something or a suggestion that compels them to do something. What you are talking about are more like demons. Today this word has unfortunate negative connotations so you can't use that either. They are too unsophisticated to be called spirits. It doesn't match any medieval concept I know of, so you might be better off inventing a new word. They are like little living machines. Maybe the successful ones evolve into your demigods. Hmmm, you could have microgods and demigods. I'd reserve "god" for the Big Kahuna.


I've been toying with the word "vim" as a count noun. The unintelligent ones are vims, and the more intelligent ones that try to trick people can either be angels or demons. Vim is a kind of archaic word for energy, but hasn't ever been used quite this way. I want them all (vims, demons, ghosts of ancestors) to be called spirits so it makes sense to call their world the "spirit world", which people will immediately understand. Maybe the dominant ones can be spirits, and it can just be understood that the world is named after the spirits but the vims also live there. My thought is that when an intelligent matter-being dies, carbon copies of their consciousnesses are released into anti-space. There is an ancestral plane where they are stable, but this is really hard for the living to get to. Then there are the planes where the vims and demons live, and while copies of ancestors go there, they are often predated by carnivorous spirits (and if they survive, they become grisled, and are "clones" of the actual ancestral spirits; they don't know about each other's experiences).

PatrickPowers wrote:Then it would make sense for the residents of anti-space to be completely composed of energy. They could be knotted vortexes of energy. Such vorticies actually exist, though they haven't been studied much. If the knotted vortex has the minimum amount of energy then it can be quite stable. It is said that it has "one quantum" of energy. It isn't possible for it to have less energy and still exist, so such things can be surprisingly stable, especially in anti-space where there is no matter to interfere with it. They would be even more stable because there is no matter in anti-space to absorb them or otherwise cause trouble. There would be much less entropy (undesirable, degrading randomness) in such a place. Energy doesn't degrade there. Even in our Universe, light can pass through 13 billion light years without degrading at all, as long as it doesn't encounter matter.

Make them immortal if you like. Quantum objects can exist forever, they just can't DO anything in that state. To effect any sort of change in anything -- that includes thinking -- they need to use energy. But it might not be that much. Consider the enzyme. Enzymes are a lot like what you have in mind. They cause chemical reactions with very little energy. That's what makes life more efficient than a machine. I'll tell you more about that if you like later.


The knotted vortices are what I'm thinking of as the "manmade" vims. I figure some people are able to "fish" for the stable (simple) ones, and then shape them (through meditation and possibly sacrifices of worldly energy) into bose machines, each one capable a specific purpose. I love your analog to enzymes for these. I figure these will be "tied around" physical objects in The Universe, so they don't get lost; like a string on a balloon. These talismans could be anything, but are typically small wooden tokens with instructions carved into them.

Do you think any type of chemical/energy reaction might be possible here, conceivably? Starting a fire, making lightning strike, digesting someone alive, telekinesis? Can you think of anything that wouldn't be possible?
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Re: Fantasy setting with 4D magic

Postby PatrickPowers » Sat Nov 17, 2018 12:04 pm

Oops! Posted it twice.
Last edited by PatrickPowers on Sat Nov 17, 2018 12:08 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Fantasy setting with 4D magic

Postby PatrickPowers » Sat Nov 17, 2018 12:07 pm

samdkatz wrote:
I've been toying with the word "vim" as a count noun. The unintelligent ones are vims, and the more intelligent ones that try to trick people can either be angels or demons. Vim is a kind of archaic word for energy, but hasn't ever been used quite this way. I want them all (vims, demons, ghosts of ancestors) to be called spirits so it makes sense to call their world the "spirit world", which people will immediately understand. Maybe the dominant ones can be spirits, and it can just be understood that the world is named after the spirits but the vims also live there. My thought is that when an intelligent matter-being dies, carbon copies of their consciousnesses are released into anti-space. There is an ancestral plane where they are stable, but this is really hard for the living to get to. Then there are the planes where the vims and demons live, and while copies of ancestors go there, they are often predated by carnivorous spirits (and if they survive, they become grisled, and are "clones" of the actual ancestral spirits; they don't know about each other's experiences).


This all works for me. Vim as in "vim and vigor."

samdkatz wrote:The knotted vortices are what I'm thinking of as the "manmade" vims. I figure some people are able to "fish" for the stable (simple) ones, and then shape them (through meditation and possibly sacrifices of worldly energy) into bose machines, each one capable a specific purpose. I love your analog to enzymes for these. I figure these will be "tied around" physical objects in The Universe, so they don't get lost; like a string on a balloon. These talismans could be anything, but are typically small wooden tokens with instructions carved into them.

Knotted vortices of energy would be very small. They are the energy equivalent to atoms. In fact, back in 1895 or so Lord Kelvin and others were quite hot on the idea that our atoms WERE knotted vortices. It turned out not to be true, but the idea caught on in the math world. The study of knots has been a very prestigious area ever since, producing a high proportion of Fields medal winners. The different sorts of knots would be equivalent to our elements. All life is built of only about a dozen elements, so you would need only that many types of knots. The knotted vortices would then supposedly attract one another much like atoms forming molecules. That's how you can get life forms made out of energy. So even the vims would be composed of a great many knots, like a bacterium has a great many atoms.

BUT knots can be as complex as you like. It would be possible to have huge organism sized knots. It's just hard to see how they would evolve naturally. Since your vims don't evolve naturally, maybe that would be a good choice for them. Or they could be composed of ten or a hundred or a thousand big knots stuck together, like a machine is made out of standardized parts: screws, levers, knobs, choppers, etc. That would be more practical

samdkatz wrote:Do you think any type of chemical/energy reaction might be possible here, conceivably? Starting a fire, making lightning strike, digesting someone alive, telekinesis? Can you think of anything that wouldn't be possible?

I'd say that the anti-world would be very good at producing sparks in our world. Lightning is just a big spark, taking a lot of power but basically the same thing. Digesting someone alive is chemical, so I don't see that. That's an atom thing. Maybe they can inhibit energy so that someone's molecules stop attracting each other and the person slides into a puddle of bones and bloody goo. (Gross!) That seems somewhat outlandish to me. Boiling them alive with microwaves would be far easier and at least as gross.

Energy can move matter, so telekenesis would be possible. It would be a lot more organized and controlled than a lightning strike, so harder to do. Heating things up without moving them would be very easy.

Matter is stuck in our world, so teleporting couldn't be done. Could they plant thoughts in people's minds? Thoughts are electrical energy, so it would seem so. It would be the most sophisticated technology of all though, possibly beyond the edge of possibility. You'd have to understand someone's brain in very great detail to do that. Whispering in someone's ear so that they hear voices would be a lot easier. All you are doing is causing air molecules to move in an organized way. I guess a vim could be built to do that.

So from easiest to hardest

Heating things up
Sparks/Lightning
Influencing the movement of "random" things like casting the I Ching , affecting rolling dice to come up a certain way, or a great many other things limited only by imagination.
Moving things directly. Wind.
Whispering in the ear/Louder speech
Creating an energy body, like ball lightning.
Having that energy body do something useful.

Well beyond these would be introducing a thought directly.

Cooling something down or disintegrating something would involve some completely unknown inhibiting "force" or more like an anti-force. Seems to me that you have enough to work with without making up a new and weird basic force.

Matter can't leave this world so teleportation (discontinuous motion) would be impossible. Causing matter to travel in time is pretty much the same thing so ditto.

If the anti-world has a different time then it could be easy for them to access different times in our world. That would be very powerful. If something happens you don't like in this world, then go to an earlier time and do some little thing that prevents it. If you can use the so-called butterfly effect to your advantage then you have a great power while expending very little energy. You could go back a billion years and do some tiny thing that causes the orbit of the Earth to be different two billion years later. The anti-beings aren't traveling in their own time -- that would be weird -- but they can appear to "travel" in our time and mess with our causality. Retrocausality is mentioned these days in physics without embarrassment, so it is possibly coming into vogue.
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Re: Fantasy setting with 4D magic

Postby samdkatz » Sat Nov 17, 2018 8:01 pm

PatrickPowers wrote:Knotted vortices of energy would be very small. They are the energy equivalent to atoms. ... The different sorts of knots would be equivalent to our elements. All life is built of only about a dozen elements, so you would need only that many types of knots. The knotted vortices would then supposedly attract one another much like atoms forming molecules. That's how you can get life forms made out of energy. So even the vims would be composed of a great many knots, like a bacterium has a great many atoms.

BUT knots can be as complex as you like. It would be possible to have huge organism sized knots. It's just hard to see how they would evolve naturally. Since your vims don't evolve naturally, maybe that would be a good choice for them. Or they could be composed of ten or a hundred or a thousand big knots stuck together. Whatever.


Oh, thanks for clarifying. Maybe best for them to be made of many of these, yeah.

PatrickPowers wrote:Matter is stuck in our world, so teleporting couldn't be done.

I was thinking maybe it could be figured out every once in a while by "crazy" people in cahoots with greater than 3 dimensional beings by creating energy shields around the matter. The larger an object, the more energy this takes, and transporting a living thing usually never goes well (running out of air comes to mind). I figure this wouldn't be a terribly fast form of travel (or even one with a predictable duration?), but it could be used to get something out of a locked box, or, if you dare attempt human out-travel, through a wall. This is like Gandalf-level stuff, while most of what we're talking about is making a sword glow. Much more common than actually going into anti-space will be astral projection into it (remember that the mind extends into it, so it's just a matter of concentration (but like, Buddhist monk concentration).

PatrickPowers wrote:So from easiest to hardest

Heating things up
Sparks/Lightning
Influencing the movement of "random" things like casting the I Ching , affecting rolling dice to come up a certain way, or a great many other things limited only by imagination.
Moving things directly. Wind.
Whispering in the ear/Louder speech
Creating an energy body, like ball lightning.
Having that energy body do something useful.

I love this list!

PatrickPowers wrote:Well beyond these would be introducing a thought directly.

Cooling something down or disintegrating something would involve some completely unknown inhibiting "force" or more like an anti-force. Seems to me that you have enough to work with without making up a new and weird basic force.

Oh, but do allow me to make up a new and weird basic force, and this actually addresses both of these. :P

I was thinking that some of the Bose organisms are parasites, and feed on the energy produced in the material world. The most common type of Bose food is minds, which are right there in anti-space. Or rather, the parasites derive energy from mental states. This is also how they communicate with each other, and with the material minds. Thus, completely disintegrating something would still be quite difficult, a vim for doing something fairly specific to the mind wouldn't require such detailed knowledge of its construction, as long as it was constructed from a base vim that naturally understands some aspect of the mind. The vim would act as a sort of "operating system" that can read the intentions of the creator/caster and translate that into visions/desires/thoughts in the target. Making this feel "natural", though, would be the real "art". (Quotes because it's partially up to the vim to be artful, but a human creator can help this artfulness by allowing the vim insight into the human mind).

As for messing with time... I'm not sure I want to go there, but it's good to know it's a plausible option if I need it.
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Re: Fantasy setting with 4D magic

Postby PatrickPowers » Sun Nov 18, 2018 4:41 pm

I wrote more on the CFT/AdS correspondence but the system trashed it. There's something wrong with hi.gher.space or its server.

Anyway the two spaces are our 3+1 universe and the 4+1 anti-space. The latter is actually a 10 dimensional space that collapses down in some way to the 4+1 anti-space. The 3+1 space is the boundary or surface of that 4+1 space.

What goes on the 3+1 universe and the 4+1 universe is in a sense exactly the same information. The anti-space's weird bent character "acts as a lens that focuses information" and allows this correspondence to exist.

Black holes form very easily in the anti-space.

It's actually not unusual for the boundary of a volume to contain all info about what is going on inside that volume.
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Re: Fantasy setting with 4D magic

Postby PatrickPowers » Mon Nov 19, 2018 11:18 am

I've gotten interested in this CFT/AdS correspondence. The literature is very hard to understand, but I could get a little bit. I don't know that this will be much use to the original poster, but someone else might be interested, and I want to write it down before forget.

Start with string theory, which only works in a flat 10D space.

Compactify five of the dimensions and make the other 4+1 (four physical, one time) hyperbolic. The compact dimensions can then be neglected.

The surface of the 4+1 hyperbolic space is the 3+1 "flat" space of our Universe. (You will often read that our 3D universe is flat. True the three physical dimensions are flat, but when we include time then the 3+1 universe is hyperbolic. But we ignore that because it is only noticeable near the speed of light, which we never do in everyday life.)

There is a correspondence between 1) a certain theory having to do with particles in the 3+1 "flat" space and 2) general relativity in the 4+1 hyperbolic space. One of the main uses of the correspondence is that the particle theory in 3+1 is too hard to calculate with in the case of gluon-quark plasmas. So translate over into the 4+1 space, where the particles are mapped to black holes. Do your calculations there. That seems very hard too, but the original is even worse. Then once you've got your answer, translate it back.

I'm sure that this is gobbledygook to just about everybody, and my grasp on it is quite weak, but I can say some things about what hyperbolic spaces are like. Consider blowing up a balloon. In a hyperbolic space the radius doesn't increase as fast as it does in our flat space. The balloon is smaller, but it is holding as much air. The balloon is smaller, but contains just as much space as our balloon in flat space.

If you have a city in hyperbolic space, everybody can live closer to the city center. For them, there is more space a mile from the city center than there is for us. The further you get from the city center, the more difference it makes. There would be much more space for them 1000 miles from the city center than we have.

If you move around it is like chasing the rainbow. The space right around you always looks pretty much like ours. The further away from you, the bigger the effect. But if you travel to that distant place, it looks normal.

If you live in a place where you see things by light reflecting off stuff, then the space acts like a concave lens. Stuff looks further away than it does for us. So things (I think) don't actually look all that different. Say, there is twice as many houses 10 miles away than we are used to, but it looks like they are 20 miles away so the density looks the same as what we are used to. The difference is that if you go to one of those houses for a party then you need travel only half the distance that it appeared you would have to do. That would be kind of nice, no? It would certainly save on gasoline.

Things are closer together in a hyperbolic space without being any more dense. I like to say it is more compact.

Having one more dimension than ours in the 4+1 space also makes it more compact.
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