In his classic A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking freely admitted he struggled to visualise multiple dimensions – barely coping with two. If the physicist who upturned thinking about black holes, relativity and quantum mechanics could not quite grapple with the shape of the universe (or in his case, of the many universes), what hope have the rest of us?
In his classic A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking freely admitted he struggled to visualise multiple dimensions – barely coping with two. If the physicist who upturned thinking about black holes, relativity and quantum mechanics could not quite grapple with the shape of the universe (or in his case, of the many universes), what hope have the rest of us?
Fortunately – at least for the purposes of daily life on one planet and including such challenging tasks as piloting an aircraft – there is a trick to getting one’s head around up to four dimensions. Three are our familiar left-right, forward-back, up-down; the fourth is time. All four must align to have a collision.
Thales
European avionics champion Thales is introducing a fifth dimension: aircraft weight. But even that is not so hard to grasp – as any pilot knows, performance depends on load. Thales’ in-development PureFlyt flight-management system will draw on lots of data and computing power to continuously calculate time- and fuel-optimised “5D” route options based on location, velocity, desired landing time and changing variables like weather, traffic and fuel load. Straightforward, if easier said than done.
Jumping way ahead, one can imagine fully-automated airspace where air traffic control and flight-management systems work in perfect, clockwork harmony.
But the real world is a 6D place and that sixth dimension – uncertainty – is an unfathomable quantum phenomenon. It could perhaps, for the purposes of civil aviation, be adequately managed with enough real-time data and computer power. But short of scientific and engineering revolutions in computing, sensors and artificial intelligence, we shall remain reliant on the most fickle, fallible technology in the whole, complex system: the human pilot.
