The size, or scale, of objects in our world is a commonplace part of our universe.  We experience objects smaller than ourselves, like a pin, and objects larger than ourselves, like a building.  For centuries our reality did not go beyond what we can directly experience through our five senses – call this our ‘Direct Sensory World’.  The Greeks may have hypothesized atoms, but they could not perceive any such objects.  In the last few hundred years, science and technology have shown us very small atomic particles and very large stellar objects.  We cannot experience these objects directly with our five senses and need tools to perceive them.  This world, expanded through technological tools, we might call our ‘Indirect Sensory World’.  For people anywhere in the world, these indirect objects could not be experienced a thousand years ago and so, experientially, this ‘Indirect Sensory World’ did not exist to humans back then.

Today we know of and accept this Indirect Sensory World as a part of our reality.  Further, we understand the scale of objects in this world to be along some sort of continuum – from the very small to our scale to the very large[1].  As we have discovered larger and smaller objects, this continuum has expanded several orders of magnitude just in the past century.  Along with the discovery of these objects comes what we consider to be ‘space’ – that “realm or expanse in which all material objects are located and all events occur.” (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/space)  As the scale of objects we discover expands, so does the length of the scale continuum and also so should our model of space expand.

However, our geometric model of space has not changed over a few millennium.    We have expanded the objects we find in space by many orders of scale and use a continuum of scale to understand, yet we still hold to a three-dimensional model of space devised more than two million years ago.  Consider the full definition of ‘space’ from Dictionary.com: “the unlimited or incalculably great three-dimensional realm or expanse in which all material objects are located and all events occur.” (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/space)  From Merriam-Webster.com: “a boundless three-dimensional extent in which objects and events occur and have relative position and direction” (Merriam-Webster.com:space).  From Wikipedia.com: “Space is the boundless three-dimensional extent in which objects and events have relative position and direction.” (Wikipedia:Space) Does this few million-year-old model appropriately include the scale of objects we have found recently (our Indirect Sensory Space)?  We still consider the only possible continuums, the only dimensions, of physical experiential space to be length, width, and height.  Yet we agree that our reality also includes a continuum of scale (see footnote).  The three dimensions define a very human-centric model based upon our Direct Sensory World and stemming from our day-to-day experiences.  We continue to think our ‘original’ human-centric three dimensions are the only dimensions needed to uniquely locate an object in space, regardless of the continuum of scale.  This model also means these three dimensions are the only directions in which objects can travel – an implicit limitation of this model.  Is this three dimensional (3-D) model the ‘best’ model for understanding space?  This author proposes our few millennia old 3-D model of space is not sufficient to model the universe we see today encompassing Indirect Sensory Space.  A ‘better’ model is needed, in particular to encompass this continuum we find of scale

[1] Check out: Cosmic Zoom; Powers of Ten;  http://htwins.net/scale/; http://www.scaleofuniverse.com or Gott, J. Richard and Vanderbei, Robert J. “Sizing Up the Universe: The Cosmos in Perspective”; 2010; National Geographic