In his recent Ted-X lecture, Jacques Vallée explains that in a crude physical library (such as that at the Library of Congress) we need dimensions to store and navigate our information cache. In ‘modern’ libraries, such as the cloud-storage used by electronic data providers, we use methods which ‘sprinkle’ information statistically into the existing cache (we call this the cloud), and we use hashing methods to retrieve it.

This is still primitive compared to Nature, and the methods used to store and manipulate ‘information’ in living systems and the universe… but one idea here is interesting to me: that dimensions are a cultural artifact, and will be discarded or devalued in our coming understandings of physics.

“Vallée (illustrates) that the universe is a subset of a meta-information structure. This is the first insight on which to build a physics of the future. Another foundational point is that dimensions are control artifacts, and we should do away with them in the physics of the future. Lastly we should recognize that consciousness by traversing information associations creates the illusions of space and time. Thus, in a physics of the future which will unify Relativity and quantum physics, the very ideas of space and time will have to be abandoned, being recognized as approximations rather than actual properties of the world.” — Dr. Maxim Kammerer