A Milky Way Discourse in the Sixth Dimension: From the Poetry of Strings to the De Bethune Kind of Blue Tourbillon

This three-dimensional cage woven out of string upon string,

A divine breath hidden in the breast of matter.

The Milky Way turns with a quadrillion stars,

And in the sixth dimension the wheels come to verse and to speech.

Gravity, which bends the light, has an eye in the darkness,

And that Infinite Architect leaves a trace on every measure and every dial.

In the eleven-dimensional space-time continuum that string theory, which is to say M-theory, predicts, the three dimensions of space and the one of time that we perceive are only the part of the iceberg above the water. The remaining dimensions are rolled up inside folds called Calabi-Yau manifolds.

In that layer of the sixth dimension, where all possible universes and all possible timelines extend at once, two conscious beings came face to face: the earthly astrophysicist and poet Ege Alper, and the Cosmic Interlocutor, a luminous and conscious being able to perceive the folds of space-time directly.

Ege Alper had slipped free of the gravity of the three-dimensional world. Here there was neither past nor future. Everything was inside the now, all at once.

Ege Alper spoke first. You who read the depth of the universe line by line, he said. My body was bound to three-dimensional soil but my mind always wandered in those spiral arms of the Milky Way, a hundred thousand light years across. Looking from here, the universe is no different from diamond dust spilled over velvet.

The Cosmic Interlocutor answered. That is because down in the lower universe you only see the reflection of light, Ege. That galactic house you call the Milky Way is a thin sheet of paper floating on between a hundred and four hundred billion stars, on vast quantum vacuum fluctuations, and on the dark matter your eye has never seen. It is about eighty five per cent of all the matter in the universe, and you have never once looked at it.

While the two conscious beings watched the Milky Way from the transparent dais of the sixth dimension, verses and sayings began to fly through the air.

Even the vacuum we take for nothingness is not empty, said Ege Alper. The virtual particles that come into being and vanish again in an instant through quantum vacuum fluctuations are, in truth, the tremor at the quantum level of the command the Creator breathes continuously into the universe. All three of the great books begin at the same place: first an order, then light. And before that light appeared, the vacuum was already foaming.

And the sturdy skeleton that holds that light together is dark matter, Ege, said the Cosmic Interlocutor. If that invisible matter had not opened its gravitational wells, the Scutum-Centaurus and Perseus arms of the Milky Way would have come apart and drifted away. That ancient saying about a sky laid down in layers and in a flawless order means exactly this. Without that hidden gravity the necklace would scatter.

At the very heart of the Milky Way a vast monster lies, four million times the mass of the sun, said Ege Alper. Sagittarius A star, the supermassive black hole. That point which swallows even light and stops time. Black holes are like the majesty that appeared on the mountain when the commandments were given to the prophet Moses, and ground that mountain to powder. It is the place where time and space lose their authority.

That black hole is the wheel of the galaxy, said the Cosmic Interlocutor. Your own sun runs around it at eight hundred and twenty eight thousand kilometres an hour, and completes a single circuit only once in two hundred and thirty million years. This is the counterpart of the old line that puts the beginning and the end in the same place. The whole galaxy comes out of Him, turns by the law of attraction He laid down, and returns to Him.

The diagram of the chain is simple. Quantum vacuum fluctuations are the ground that feeds dark matter; dark matter is the unseen skeleton of the galaxy; at the centre of that skeleton Sagittarius A star turns like a wheel; and around that wheel hundreds of billions of stars, our own sun among them, run in their orbits. Four links, one order.

As Ege Alper and the Cosmic Interlocutor walked in the spirals of the sixth dimension, they read to one another these lines written for the Milky Way.

A quadrillion seeds turning in its spiral arms,

There is no room here for coincidence, and none for being at the mercy of fate.

Dark energy widens this endless sky,

And the sixth dimension unties that blind knot in the mind.

The sun is a mote out there, the earth a speck of dust,

And yet the meaning of the universe is in the human heart.

By the One who bends the light, this order,

Is the work of a single Architect, perfect and entire.

This gravitational, quantum and galactic grandeur that Ege Alper and the Cosmic Interlocutor witnessed in the sixth dimension takes solid form as a watch at the highest summit the human mind and microscopic handwork can reach: the De Bethune Kind of Blue Tourbillon.

It stands in the maison’s own catalogue under the reference DB28XSTB and is introduced as the tourbillon version of the thirty nine millimetre DB28 Kind of Blue. The watch is like a cosmic object that fell into our three-dimensional universe out of the sixth.

Case and dial alike are blued and polished grade 5 titanium. In the workshop Denis Flageollet built, titanium is coloured by heat and not by paint: the metal is brought to a particular temperature under the flame, and the oxide layer that forms on its surface refracts the light and gives this blue. The blue on the dial, in other words, is not something laid over the metal. It is a state of the metal itself.

What this blue calls to the reader’s mind is the void Ege Alper looked into from the sixth dimension. There is not a single star on this dial; there is the darkness itself. The maison’s star-studded sky, woven with hand-fitted white gold and diamond pins, sits on the forty two point six millimetre DB28 Tourbillon. Here the sky has not been painted. It has been emptied.

The triangular bridge rising at the centre of the dial gathers the whole architecture of the watch onto a single line. Beneath it, at six o’clock, stands the thirty second tourbillon cage. The cage is made of silicon and titanium and is the maison’s innovation of 2008; it turns once every thirty seconds rather than once a minute, and carries the seconds at the same time.

A misunderstanding has to be corrected here. A tourbillon does not undo gravity’s bending of time; no such thing is possible. What it does is far more modest and far cleverer: when the watch stands upright, gravity pulls the oscillating organ from one side only and spoils its rate. The cage turns that whole organ at a steady rhythm and so keeps changing the direction of the pull, which cancels the error against itself within one revolution. A tourbillon protects not time, but the thing that measures time.

Inside runs the calibre DB2009V7. It is wound by hand and runs five days off a self-regulating twin barrel. The balance wheel is titanium with pieces of white gold set into it, tuned that way against differences of temperature and against the resistance of the air. The escape wheel is silicon, and the balance spring takes the flat terminal curve the maison patented for itself.

The floating lugs on either side of the case are the mechanism the maison patented in 2006. The case hangs between them and settles onto the curve of the wrist by itself. Both faces carry sapphire crystal at eighteen hundred Vickers hardness, with anti-reflective coating on both sides.

When Ege Alper and the Cosmic Interlocutor, meeting in the sixth dimension, looked at this watch that had risen onto their wrists, they came together on the same truth.

If a person, looking at this thermally blued titanium dial, at the thirty second micro tourbillon cage and at the five-day twin barrel, cannot say that this watch came together by accident in some burst of heat, that the wheels settled into place by themselves, and finds the existence of a master architect like Denis Flageollet necessary; then how can that Infinite Architect and Artist be overlooked, the one who weaves the hundred thousand light year span of the Milky Way into spiral arms, turns hundreds of billions of stars in a single order, gives life to being through quantum vacuum fluctuations, holds galaxies up with dark matter, and works those cosmic elements down to the iron in human blood?

He who paints the sky ocean blue, he who makes the strings tremble in the sixth dimension, and he who put that genius into the watchmaker’s mind, are one and the same. The universe is an enormous and living dial, crying out that He exists.

The watch on its maker’s own site: De Bethune, Kind of Blue Tourbillon