Have you ever wondered why a tree is shaped the way it is?
Perhaps not.
Perhaps you have wondered why so many things in nature are shaped like a tree?
River basins, lightning, fan corrals, the burrows of social insects. Even the way mould spreads across a damp wall, ever reaching, ever dividing, branch like. Similar to how a great oak searches for the sunlight in a dense forest.
With internal structures perhaps offering the most obvious likenesses, the analogy is more than skin deep. Anatomy such as blood vessels and bronchioles, the central nervous system or the capillaries of a kidney, major truncations dividing again and again in to infinitesimally smaller and smaller branches. A pattern repeatedly shown in nature.
But I wonder if this shape is actually more profound than simply that which we can see in our three dimensional world.
The tree of life, the very thing that most embodies this phenomenon is a four dimensional tree.
Evolution tracks the division of speciation through time. Earths family tree began with a single acorn - LUCA, Our last universal common ancestor gave rise to the entire canopy of organisms that we see today. In other words, nature doesnât just look like a tree, itâs literally branching off from one.
Our three dimensional limits mean that we cannot experience this tree directly, in fact we are only conscious of it from two dimensional book illustrations. Regardless of this, the likeness does not escape us.
Itâs almost like the three dimensional trees that we see in nature, are just off-shoots from a much larger, mostly hidden higher dimensional tree.
Further intricacies emerge when we take this concept further.
Think about your development from embryo to adult. You started as one cell before dividing again and again to form the multicellular creature that you are today. This development plotted through a four dimensional chart would indeed look tree shaped.
Such revelations offer unique perspectives on things.
Can we begin to infer more about the universe based on a shape that we keep seeing? Are we in fact observing the form of the universe?
Does a tree represent a ripple in the multidimensional pond so to speak. An imprint in the mud, replications of a more fundamental master-cast at work. Could the tree of life in turn be an off-shoot of a fifth dimensional tree?
What happen to the macro, is also true of the micro.
Our lives are playing out through an ever increasing tree of choice. Every time you make the slightest decision, you opt to follow a new branch in your life. You donât experience the branches unchosen, but that doesnât mean they are not there.
When a leaf cutter ant embarks on a journey up a fig, they remain oblivious to the branches they choose not to follow. They simply follow one road that leads to the leaves at the top. The same ant could climb the same tree twenty times, and each time follow a different branch, but to the ant, there is only one route to the leaves. To us from our vantage point can clearly see multiple branches that exist simultaneously, a foresight simply not gifted to the ant.
This is a little like ourselves on our journey through life. We are not gifted with a higher dimensional vantage point, we cannot see our choices not taken, but if we could, our lives would not look linear, but tree shaped instead.
What I am describing is of course the multiverse. Alternative realities occupying and overlapping in the same plot of spacetime continuum.
In such a scenario, choice would indeed be an elusion as we make every choice all at the same time, we simply experience one.
It would mean that the future, as defined by every possibility that could exist, already does exist. Like the ant on the fig, we are simply navigating a predefined tree.
So coming back to my opening question.
Have you ever wondered why a tree is shaped like it is?
My emphatic answer is this, a tree is shaped like it is, because everything in this universe is tree shaped if you look at it from the right vantage point.
A tree is simply a three dimensional replication of the universe that spawned it. A footprint in the sand if you will.
You are too when viewed in four dimensions. Both your biological development and the life that you follow plot a tree shape with time.
And if three dimensional trees are simply off-shoots from four dimensional trees, itâs likely true for the fifth dimension and so on, constantly re-occurring like the Mandelbrot set.
Anyway, just a thought.













