Have you ever played Super Mario before? If the answer is no, then do you have any idea what Super Mario is? This game was first released in 1985 and it is dubbed by a number of critics as one of the best games ever – it went on to sell over 40 million copies according to the 1999 Guinness Book of World Records. Super Mario is a scrolling platform game and it is the first in this genre to feature smooth-scrolling levels. Mr. Mario can only scroll or move either to the right or to the left of the screen. Oh yeah, I almost forget, he can jump too.

Let’s consider asking Mario to get out of the screen – moving sideways – in order to dodge King Koopa’s incoming hammer. I am sure you won’t find such move in neither the game’s manual nor in any cheat site. Well, even if you ask Mr. Mario personally, I am pretty sure he will reply to you with something like “You must be joking” or “Are you out of your mind?” Mr. Mario ‘lives’ in a two dimensional world in his entire life, so pardon him for being oblivious to the fact that he can actually dodge the hammer sideways instead of just jumping up and down. Luckily the advent of the 3D graphic accelerator has made modern game characters like Dr. Gordon Freeman (Half Life), Sam Fisher (Splinter Cell), and Dr. Malcolm Betruger (Doom) able to dodge incoming projectiles sideways. In other words, they are much more realistic due to the three dimensional game engine which resembles how we perceive our surrounding. But the question is: What is reality?

I am sorry if some readers are now at sea with what’s going on, as all these game terms and jargons can be quite confusing to the non-gamerz (spell-check off). I guess I will try to explain my idea with analogies from the real world, where everyone reading this article will be familiar with – providing that you are from earth. Consider the fact that some fishes use only two-dimensional vision instead of our usual three-dimensional vision. Scientists think that many fish find it more important to be able to look all around them for predators, than to accurately gage distance. For that reason their eyes’ visual areas do not overlap, but point to the left or right. Try telling a 2D vision fish that the shark he is seeing is actually 300 meters away, so he can chill for awhile before going ‘all ahead full.’ I bet the fish will say (if possible), “I am seeing a baby shark that is why it looks tiny, not because it is far away. I am sure that he is actually right in front of my nose. Well, I better be on the safe side. So, see ya.” Oh well, you get what I mean, right?

If the example above seems fuzzy, then let’s consider two-dimensional color vision instead of two-dimensional spatial vision. Firstly, do you know what color really means?

“If you watched a wildlife series with, say, the red light source of your television removed and you then came up with conclusions about colour variation in the natural world, would anyone believe you? Probably not, but then that is what we humans are doing every time we think we are seeing the colour world of non-human animals. Unlike other variables such as length, width, mass, or time of day, colour is not an inherent property of the object; it is a property of the nervous system of the animal perceiving the light.”[1]
Humans have trichromatic, or three-dimensional colour vision while most mammals other than old-world primates, have two-dimensional colour vision. Again, you will be having a tough time describing ‘red’ to a fish that cannot see red. Worse still, there are animal with 4 and 5-dimensional colour vision! Let’s picture this scenario: You just painted your house anew and your neighbor, Mr. Peacock made this remark, “Your newly painted house looks wonderful. You have a good color taste, my friend. I love Birublur very much!” You replied, “Pardon me, Blairblur?” Mr. Peacock replied back, “I mean Birublur; your house color, of course.” You replied back, “No, its not Birublur. It is Blue…” Then you had a long quarrel with Mr. Peacock about the ‘true’ color of your house. ‘Birublur’ is a (hypothetical) forth dimension color that only Mr. Peacock can see, while you, an ordinary human being, can only see three-dimensional color. That is why you thought that Mr. Peacock was out of his mind, but it is actually you who were naïve.

I must admit that I have been using pseudo (The 2D game) and fuzzy (fish anyone?) examples thus far. Before you loose interest with my random mumbling, I guess I should get serious now. Let’s talk about our universe’s forth-dimension, namely time. Let’s say that you are traveling at 10m/s north and I am traveling 20m/s. north too. I am some distance away directly behind of you. Therefore, the relative speed between us is 10m/s or in other words, I am catching you up at a speed of 10m/s right? Let’s say that light’s speed is 20m/s(this is not light’s true speed, it’s just a hypothetical case) and there is a photon of light some distance away directly behind of you. So light will catch you up at the speed of 10m/s just like I did right? Logical reasoning says yes, but the universe does not work that way. Light will catch you up at 20m/s. In fact, even if you are traveling at 20m/s, light will still catch you up at the speed of 20m/s (the nature of light is such that its speed is constant relative to you), so that makes light’s absolute speed 40m/s (20 + 20). However, a third person who is stationary will see the SAME photon of light that chases you as traveling at the speed of only 20m/s – remember that light’s speed is always constant relative to an observer. In other words, he sees that light as not catching you up but you are seeing the same light as catching you up. You may ask, so is that photon of light’s true speed 40m/s or 20m/s? The answer is both! Again, what is reality?

This peculiar nature of light does not makes sense to you, as your mind demands that everything in this universe has to be logical. I am sorry my friend, unfortunately, it is not our job to tell light and the universe what they should do or how they should behave. Let’s just say, Mother Nature has set those laws. Shall I say, God has set those laws and you have no part in deciding it? Einstein abandoned all the proven scientific laws and mathematical theorem such as Galilean Transformation and Euclidian Geometry – geometry that you have been leaning in high school and guess what, they are actually WRONG! They are only good approximations – instead he put his trust in Principle of Relativity, which is purely an assumption. In other words, he accepted that a photon of light’s speed can be 20m/s and 40m/s at the same time. Of course it turned out that he is actually right. It’s just that light’s true speed is 3×10^8m/s (blinding fast), which is why all the mind-bending predictions about space and time that Einstein made in Special and General Relativity are counterintuitive to us. What is actually science? What is intellect and logical reasoning?

To give you a more intuitive sense of what this particular nature of light may mean to you, let me give you an example. (This example is a modified version of an example in Brian Greene’s book, The Elegant Universe) Let’s say that the leaders of Palestine and Israel are going to sign a peace treaty on a train. This train is a special one: It travel’s at relativistic speed (near the speed of light), and its carriages are all transparent so that people from outside can see what is happening inside. To add a bit of a twist to this anecdote, let’s say that this state-of-the-art train is engineered by an Israeli. Thousands of Palestinian and Israelis are waiting at a train station which is situated at the border of the two countries, as the treaty is scheduled to be made when the train passes that station. Let’s forget about the impossibility of the human eye to focus on something that moves near the speed of light. There is a long table in the train and there is a light bulb in the middle of the table. The Israeli president sits at one end of the table with his back facing the front of the train and the Palestinian president sits on the other end where his face is facing the front of the train. The rule is like this: The carriage will be made pitch dark. When the light bulb in the middle of the train is switched on, both leaders will sign the treaty. This is to make sure that they sign it at the exact same time (again forget about human’s reaction time). There is also a third person in the train to verify that the treaty is signed together and nobody cheats.

Now, the train is passing the designated station and the light bulb switches on. Both leaders play by the rule and they sign the treaty together, as confirmed by the third person. So we are on a verge of a new peaceful era in the Middle East, right? Shockingly, fighting starts between the Israelis and the Palestinians who are at the train station after the treaty was signed. Shall I say kudos to the Israeli engineer who designed this train? People from the platform claim that the Palestinian leader cheated: They say he signed the treaty first. Mind you that this is not some twist of the truth – this is the reality. People from outside of the train will indeed see that the Palestinian leader signed the treaty first, but the three people inside the train will claim that they agreed that nobody cheats. I can hear you say, “How could that be? This is a single event; therefore there can’t be two truths about it.” I don’t want to bore you with the technicalities here, but to cut long story short: It is because time is relative and a SINGLE event is not the same for different observers in different frames. So, do you understand what is time? When I say time, I am not talking about the watch that you are wearing on your wrist or even just the feeling of the passing of time. I am talking about all the events that had happened, are happening, and will happen in your life and the nature of this world that YOU THINK you understand. I am talking about the peculiar 4^th dimension of our universe that we cannot comprehend but it is true. If you can recall back, we are just like Mr. Mario here – unaware about the upper dimension that actually exists.

You may wonder, what am I trying to say after all these random points? Simply put: Realize that your intellect is actually limited! It bothers me that some people think that they can reason out everything in this world logically; even stuff in the realm of the infinite. Actually these people who think that their intellect has no boundaries are only Marios: Limited by their platform’s sluggish 16-bit processor and wanting for a 3D accelerator upgrade. I hope you don’t get segmentation fault when you try to jump out of the screen next time around – bad programming practice!

p/s: Video game is a waste of time.

[1] Exploring the Forth Dimension, Ecology of Vision, Biological Sciences, University of Bristol 2002.