Introduction
Where does our perception of the world come from? Only a minor part is a result of our observations and thoughts. Most of our beliefs are based on information we receive from other people. First, we heard something at home from our parents and siblings, later at school from our teachers and peers, something we learned from books and magazines. A significant amount of information we can get from the television or the Internet. If all such information happened to be consistent and created a picture of the world relevant to our needs, we would not have any doubts or make any changes, even if the picture was incorrect. In reality, the obtained information is neither sufficient nor consistent. On the basis of our upbringing, emotions and arbitrary likes and dislikes, we accept some authorities and sources of information which we believe in more than in others. They give us grounds for constituting our model of the world we take as the real one.
Are we really able on our own to verify what the real truth is and what is only our guess or belief? In some cases we can try. However, the greatest problem is to achieve new solutions in domains where everybody considers any given theorem as obvious and therefore agrees with it. In this way it will never come to our minds that it might be different.
The fact that our perception of the world may be wrong, I realised when writing the book ‘Probably everything is different’. I tried to show, among others, what image of the world might be created by intelligent computers in the future. The view of the world from a different perspective offered many surprising possibilities in interpreting various phenomena around us and gave a rise to many new questions. The most interesting and fascinating phenomenon to me appeared to be the geometry of the Universe.
My previous perception was probably similar to the perception of most of the people around me because it had been shaped on the basis of the information from school, common scientific literature generally available in bookshops and articles from magazines, or on the Internet. There were no reasons for me to doubt in the truthfulness of such picture. The doubts arose only when I began to think how the information about the world can be transferred to computers, the manner they can process it and what conclusions can be then reached.
Gradually, I commenced to alter my opinion regarding the observable universe, time and space-time. In the natural and unexpected way, the quantum phenomena appeared in my space-time model. In this model, particles and forces are understood in a different way.
The Universe may look differently than the way we present it. The picture that appeared when taking other perspective varies from the one we are used to. If I showed only the results in this work, it would be difficult to fully understand them. More appropriate is to show the entire path of reasoning. It does not only give the opportunity to understand better the presented ideas, but also enhances the chance to develop them.