Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

The Dragon in My Garage
critical scrutiny? If he allowed himself to be deceived by one
subject, how do we know the same wasn't true of all?
Mack talks about these cases, the 'phenomena', as posing a
fundamental challenge to western thinking, to science, to logic
itself. Probably, he says, the abducting entities are not alien
beings from our own universe, but visitors from 'another dimension'.
Here's a typical, and revealing, passage from his book:
When abductees call their experience 'dreams', which they
often do, close questioning can elicit that this may be a
euphemism to cover what they are sure cannot be that,
namely an event from which there was no awakening that
occurred in another dimension.
Now the idea of higher dimensions did not arise from the brow of
UFOlogy or the New Age. Instead, it is part and parcel of the
physics of the twentieth century. Since Einstein's general relativity,
a truism of cosmology is that space-time is bent or curved
through a higher physical dimension. Kaluza-Klein theory posits
an eleven-dimensional universe. Mack presents a thoroughly
scientific idea as the key to 'phenomena' beyond the reach of
science.
We know something about how a higher-dimensional object
would look in encountering our three-dimensional universe. For
clarity, let's go down one dimension: an apple passing through a
plane must change its shape as perceived by two-dimensional
beings confined to the plane. First it seems to be a point, then
larger apple cross-sections, then smaller ones, a point again, and
finally - poof! - gone. Similarly, a fourth- or higher-dimensional
object - provided it's not a very simple figure such as a hypercylinder
passing through three dimensions along its axis - will wildly
alter its geometry as we witness it passing through our universe. If
aliens were systematically reported as shape-changers, I could
at least see how Mack might pursue the notion of a higherdimensional
origin. (Another problem is trying to understand
what a genetic cross between a three-dimensional and a fourdimensional
being means. Are the offspring from the 3½
dimension?)
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