The new Terminator film is out imminently. Randomly, it reminded me of a fascinating TED video from physicist Garrett Lisi (worth a look, even if you think you hate physics!)

It's about dimensions, layers and imagination.

In his astounding, baffling and eye-opening talk, Lisi walks through one dimension, then another, and another, until he's eventually purporting an 8-dimensional model of the universe. Wow. It's truly mind-blowing and not something I'm going to pretend I fully understand. Instead, let's look at Terminator.

In 1984, visionary director James Cameron conceived of a monster. An indestructible man-made machine sent from the future to destroy the lineage of John Connor. We don't learn much about the machine in the first film, only that it carries a huge muscular stature mirroring what appears to be a metal endoskeleton. The machine "will not sleep, he will not stop" until he's terminated his targets.

In 1991 we start to learn more about the machine from the first film, mainly from the Terminator himself. We learn he is a T100 model run by a cybernetic computer, that he does indeed not sleep, nor feel the anxieties of fear and regret that most humans feel when they're instructed to kill. But in this film, the Terminator's main characteristics are outlined principally to compare him with a superior machine, the T1000. Where in 1984 the Terminator was seen as an uber-human compared to the weaknesses of humanity, in 1991 it has usurped the role of the human and has become the inferior in place of a machine that throws all his technologies into antiquity.

The T1000 has an extra 0 at the end of its name, for one. A small, but important, reference to how advanced it is. It carries all the best bits of the T100 - the strength and resilience, for instance - but adds to it the ability to morph into whatever (superficial) form it comes into contact with, including metal objects - "stabbing weapons". It is, again, the ultimate human / machine hybrid as conceived at the time.

By now we can see a pattern emerging. The machines in these films are representative of the imagination of the moment. In 1984, the T100 was conceived of as the ultimate. In 1991 it was the T1000. In 2003, the 3rd instalment calls its main machine protagonist, simply, T-X. The comparison between the T-100 of 1984 and the T-X of 2003 is so vast that the film sacrifices some of its credibility (could something like this really happen?) by illustrating it within the plot. Likewise, the special effects in Terminator 2, hailed at the time, are nothing in comparison to those of 2003, which itself is likely to look archaic next to the 2009 film.

The rise and rise of the machines in the Terminator films echoes the imagination of the time. As we become more and more focused on what's possible (rather than what's impossible), so too our technology will follow our imaginations. The realms of possibility are as vast as the energy we dedicate to exploring it. Garrett Lisi is testament to this. His intelligence, passion and drive are coupled with an open-mindedness that has literally opened up new dimensions even the brainiest particle physicists couldn't have imagined.

In an earlier blog I've enthused about utilities, the tools with which we navigate the cyber world. Taking the Terminator analogy further, I can see a world of programming where code does not exist in any linear sense, but flows and ebs, moves and lives: a liquid platform. While the science of robotics replicate the T-100 in mimicking human qualities within the human-occupied world, perhaps I am thinking of a T-1000 model that can digitally evolve according to its environment - the cyber environment.

Where will our imagination take cyber intelligence? How many dimensions are there left to uncover?

Lyndon