Just another primitive from Utah.
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Well, someone found some land-art…
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Unexplained buried plates is kinda why Utah exists in the first place
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all of the images seem to be taken from one location, which makes getting a handle on the shape somewhat difficult. The real question is:
What is the ratio of the sides?
In Clarkes novel, it was 1 : 4 : 9 etc, extending into further dimensions. In the movie, the ratio may have been different.
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Yeah Clarke said later the 1:4:9 ratio was a gimmick which he invented for the book. This slab thing doesn’t look right.
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“Littering. . . and creating a nuisance.” – Arlo Guthrie
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Yup. Kubrick, who made the film contemporaneously with Clarke writing the novel (based on his earlier short story The Sentinel selected by both of them), choose the monolith’s ratio in the film based on the aspect ratio of a standard cinema projection at the time. For the book, Clarke picked the squares of the first three positive integers. As you say, in the novel the scientists speculate that it extends beyond three dimensions, but that’s never proven.
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Correction: Utah exists because of a bullshit story about some buried plates made up by a misogynist horny cult leader who felt the existing Christian sects weren’t racist enough.
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Correction: Utah was stolen from the Ute and other indigenous tribes.
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In the novel the scientists speculate that it extends beyond three dimensions, but that’s never proven.
And there it breaks down. Clarke acknowledged in other works that the fourth dimension is time. If the monolith’s short edge was 1 meter long and the time edge was 16 times greater, then it would last only for the amount of time it takes light to travel 16 meters. I was a math/physics nerd in high school when the book came out, and this bugged me greatly.
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The ordering of dimensions is arbitrary. Time is often treated as a fourth dimension because in relativity one measures the space-time interval. However, this leads to a lot of confusion. The dimension of time is fundamentally different from spatial dimensions. There’s no contradiction with treating time as a fourth dimension in relativity and the possibility of a fourth or higher spatial dimension.
I mostly blame science communicators, including how physicists talk about this without clarifying for the lay audience. It’s a good opportunity to clarify it though, so I appreciate when someone brings it up.
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Time may not exist. Does an inch exist? A mile? They’re just measurements. It may fully be a human construct and something else is actually happening.
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As soon as I saw the red rocks by the structure, the whole thing became obvious. Of course a monolith has got to go there! What other thing could you possibly do with that space, except exactly this?
Definitely needs more monkeys though.
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There are a minority of physicists who theorize that to be true, most notably Julian Barbour who proposes a timeless physics.
This is related to but shouldn’t be confused with the older concept in physics of a timeless universe.
I, like most physicists am extremely skeptical of this view, but it is fascinating. A more common view on which I place much higher credence is that time is emergent, but not unreal.
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As we have evolved somewhat I would expect to see a scene of a small tribe of contractors in workwear, on their haunches, and tossing cordless Ryobi drills to the ground.
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It’s here where language gets difficult. I’m in favor of interesting ideas if they explain systems and allow for more exploration. I’m not in favor of ideas that cannot be rationalized, or ideas that preclude further exploration. So, because I said it is just a measurement and may be a construct, I was careful to also say “something else may actually be happening.” Maybe the universe is timeless, but how do we test that idea? Maybe the universe is bound, so how do we test that idea? Maybe there are or are not additional dimensions, spatial or otherwise, and… How do we test those concepts? Thanks for opening the discussion further. I love this kind of stuff.
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That’s the biggest problem I have with the timeless view of physics. As it stands, it’s non-falsafiable, like God. Now, if some enterprising theorist could come up with a clever way to experimentally test the theory, I’m prepared to reevaluate my skepticism. But so far none have, making it more of a philosophical speculation than a useful scientific theory.
Apologies to all for the inadvertent thread-jack. We should probably let it get back on topic.
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i love this, and i love the mystery of it. i just lament that it’s only a matter of time before someone locates it and some instagrammer goes there to take some bullshit advertising video with it. (actually, i read elsewhere that a clever redditor already has figured out where it is, but i don’t think he’s sharing the coordinates)
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