I’ve recently been reading The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe with my 9-year-old daughter. When one of the characters Lucy went through the wardrobe and entered another world (Narnia), she had many adventures and returned to her siblings without any appreciable amount of time passing in the real world. That reminded me of graphs I’d seen of 10-dimensional spacetime in which the familiar four-dimensional world was orthogonal to six-dimensional (Calabi-Yau) space. I wondered if going into Narnia might be like ducking into Calabi-Yau space (if we were small enough to fit in there & could get off our infernal brane) and touring around and then returning to our four-dimensional world not a minute later.
A physicist I spoke with did not think the analogy really held. He told me that time could move more slowly in Narnia if the gravitational field in Narnia were much stronger than ours or if Narnia was moving at a considerably greater speed. But my half-baked ideas about 6-dimensional spacetime didn’t make sense to him. That’s the trouble with physicists. They can’t understand the simplest ideas–so simple that even a child could get it.
