Existence of Life in 2 + 1 Dimensions

There are anthropic reasons to suspect that life in more than three spatial dimensions is not possible, and if the same could be said of fewer than three, then one would have an anthropic argument for why we experience precisely three large spatial dimensions. There are two main arguments levelled a...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:arXiv.org 2020-03
Main Author: Scargill, J H C
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Neural networks
Relativity
Topology
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:There are anthropic reasons to suspect that life in more than three spatial dimensions is not possible, and if the same could be said of fewer than three, then one would have an anthropic argument for why we experience precisely three large spatial dimensions. There are two main arguments levelled against the possibility of life in 2 + 1 dimensions: the lack of a local gravitational force and Newtonian limit in 3D general relativity, and the claim that the restriction to a planar topology means that the possibilities are 'too simple' for life to exist. I will examine these arguments and show how a purely scalar theory of gravity may evade the first one, before considering certain families of planar graphs which share properties which are observed in real-life biological neural networks and are argued to be important for their functioning.
ISSN:2331-8422
DOI:10.48550/arxiv.1906.05336