When Sam Witwicky finds a fragment of the AllSpark in the sweatshirt he wore to Mission City two years prior, all the knowledge contained within it is transferred to him. Later on in the film, Sam attends his first college lecture on astronomy at Princeton University during which his mind is taken over by the AllSpark and he begins to go on a barely decipherable rant about Albert Einstein being wrong about E = mc². More specifically, he reads an entire 903-page astronomy textbook in 32.6 seconds and then immediately raises his hand to ask his professor a question. Thanks to subtitles, this is what he says:
“I just finished your book and there’s only one problem. Einstein’s wrong. Energy does equal mass times the velocity of light squared in this dimension, but what about the other 17? Nobody ever talks about the other 17. Clear example. Break down the elemental components of Energon, assume a constant decay rate and extrapolate for each of the 14 galactic convergences it took for the Sentinel Prime expedition to receive an echo on its signal, you wind up with a formula for interdimensional energy increase that mass and light alone can’t possibly explain.”
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
This statement has baffled fans for years as it contains the kind of nonsensical scientific jargon commonly used in blockbusters to make characters sound smart, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that this statement has no implications on the wider Bayverse. This is one of the only two times the audience gets to hear the AllSpark speak, with the other mostly containing information regarding kitten calendars, so it stands to reason that there must be some conclusion to be made about it other than calling it a mental breakdown.
The Other Seventeen Dimensions
Us humans live in three dimensional space, objects here have a height, a width, and a depth. In one dimensional space, objects only have height. In two dimensional space, objects have a height and a width. In four dimensional space, objects have all previously mentioned attributes, plus they exist outside of the flow of time, as the fourth dimension is time. What the AllSpark is claiming by having Sam say that there are seventeen other dimensions than three, is that there are twenty dimensions in total. Scientific theory would suggest that fifteen of these dimensions are separate universes within the multiverse, though not how Hollywood depicts it, as that relates more to the many worlds theory. Instead, these universes were formed at the same time as ours during the Big Bang, but science as we know it formed differently within them. As such, we have no idea what they could contain, which is why people don’t really talk about them too often.
The Elemental Components of Energon
This topic has remained a mystery across most continuities, but luckily, the continuity that contains the most clues regarding the compounds of its Energon happens to be the Bayverse itself. Within the film in question, it is revealed that Energon can be harvested from stars, which must imply that Energon is made of the same elemental components as our sun. These would happen to be hydrogen, helium, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, neon, iron, silicon, magnesium, and sulfur. When these components break down, a star supernovas, but that would regard these components in a gaseous state. The Energon seen in transformers is a liquid that prevents them from rusting, so when Sam spoke of the constant decay rate of the elemental components, he was likely referring to the liquid form that decays by becoming less viable as fuel.
The Fourteen Galactic Convergences
Within astronomy, if galaxies are converging that means that separate galaxies are combining into one after having gotten stuck in each other’s gravitational fields. It just so happens that in 2018 it was discovered that 12.4 billion years ago at least fourteen galaxies began converging into one massive megastructure, which could almost make this statement by Sam seem prophetic if not for the fact that seventeen minus three equals fourteen. Seventeen was the number of other dimensions that Sam mentioned, so unless this is a coincidence, it would appear that Sam is still somehow talking about dimensions here. The direct link between galaxies and dimensions needed to sort this out is unclear, so the only simple conclusion that can be made is that Sam was just referring to the Sentinel Prime expedition crossing through different galaxies and the number of galaxies just so happened to be fourteen.
The Sentinel Prime Expedition
Now, this is odd since in the early stages of Dark of the Moon, the character of Sentinel Prime was actually being called Ultra Magnus, so the writers of this scene must not have been referring to Sentinel Prime’s long journey to the moon achieved through the use of The Ark. Other evidence points towards this too, as Sam also says this expedition received “an echo on its signal” and achieved “interdimensional energy increase” on its voyage. Starting with the echo, the best way to explain that is if the starship was sending out a distress message then they would have received the same message in response to their message. This could mean that they encountered an alternate version of their own starship, like that one episode of Cyberverse where the Ark encounters an Ark from an alternate universe while voyaging through Unspace, or it could mean something totally different. The second quote by Sam either implies that the starship had more Energon on board at the end of its expedition compared to the start, or it could imply that it had more than it should’ve after traveling the distance that it did as he made prior mention of decay rates. Anyway, none of this holds any relevance to Sentinel Prime’s journey to the moon as the Ark’s drives were destroyed just as it left Cybertron, Sentinel never sent out any distress messages, and the AllSpark wasn’t there for any of it.
The Theory
Since no concrete answers will ever be given to explain what point the AllSpark was trying to make and why, then the only answers to be found here will have to come from fans who had no part in the writing of these films. Take me for example, as I have answers derived from evidence that I’d like to share, but these answers will not be concrete and readers will have every right to disagree with them. Anyway, what if the crusades Lockdown said the Knights took part in were actually the Sentinel Prime expedition? It might seem like there’s no evidence to support this at first, but there are some quotes that at least hint at the idea.
“So lost you are, Optimus. On Cybertron we were gods and here they call us machines.” — Sentinel Prime
“We thought there's so much more potentially to explore than that, so early on we started talking about themes of creation and origin stories, and that led us to thematically kind of into wanting to explore the origins of the Transformers themselves and Optimus and whether sentient alien robots were the thing that were intended or whether that was someone else's plan gone awry.” – Ehren Kruger
“Where do you think you come from? You think you were born? No. You were built, and your creators want you back.” — Lockdown
“Remember this ship Prime? Built for all you knights, you great crusaders, to explore the universe. Well I commandeered it. It’s my personal prison now.” — Lockdown
“Join your fellow rebels, fugitive scum. It’s for the rarest of specimens, the worst of the worst. It’s taken centuries, but I’ve collected all the Knights, but you. Now the Creators want to sweep their chessboard clean. All this species mixing with species, it upsets the cosmic balance. The Creators, they don’t like it. They built you to do what you were told.” — Lockdown
“I am slave to no one.” — Optimus Prime
“Legendary warriors, the powers that created us now want us all extinguished. We must join forces or else forever be their slaves.” — Optimus Prime
The link between this and what Sam said at Princeton might not be obvious at first, but I just need you to do one thing. Rewatch the scene containing that second Lockdown quote. Once you have, rewatch it while focusing intently on his face as he says “explore the universe” and see what you notice. Don’t you think it wouldn’t have been out of character for him to have rolled his eyes as he said those words? If the Knights didn’t actually explore the universe and Lockdown was offering no praise to Optimus when he called him a great crusader, then what does this imply? Well, what if there was only ever one crusade and it was where Optimus first defied his creators, making it be what made him a fugitive? What if this supposed crusade was the Sentinel Prime expedition?
Transformers: The Covenant of Bay
Upon realizing that their automatons had achieved consciousness, a subset of Creators set out to test the boundaries of their new discovery. These Creators decided to allocate centuries of their lives to design and construct a self-sufficient society of automatons built for civilian life. With their religion barring them from allocating a naturally occuring world for the use of artificial life, an entire metallic planet made of interlocking hexagons was made as a solution, as this would also allow the automatons to shape their new society according to their will with no inhibitions from the trappings of a natural world. A Prime by the name of Sentinel was appointed as the king of this new world, being granted a vast legion of knights in order to secure his authority. When the civilians were activated and life began, cities of impressive scale were engineered across the many levels of the planet, and the world was finally named Cybertron after its artificial nature.
The Creators, in an attempt to prevent rebellion, brought their religion to this world, preaching that they alone were the chosen species destined to bring balance to the species of the universe by enforcing their doctrines across the cosmos. The Knights studied these said doctrines of the faith and came to their own conclusions, believing that the automatons at large achieving consciousness was not purely happenstance, but rather a divine miracle. They concluded that they too were enslaved, like their fellow races, as they were chained down from achieving the destiny that their creators had claimed for themselves. Hoping to inspire a rebellion and unite the races, the Knights came before Sentinel Prime and asked him to secede from the empire so that they could build their own.
The Prime believed the automatons were chosen just as the Knights did, in fact, he saw his species as gods above organics, but he valued Cybertron above all else. Seeing that a secession could lead to Cybertron’s destruction, he denied the Knights their request. The Knights did not take well to this response, then finding it incumbent upon themselves to overthrow the Prime and take control of Cybertron, giving themselves the authority to secede from the empire. When Sentinel Prime was informed of this treachery he realized his knights were not going to take no for an answer, so he devised an alternative course of action that could bring his race to the same endpoint that the Knights desired, that being freedom from the empire. The Prime was more than a mere aristocrat, he was a scientist, and he used his skills to design a technology that he would go on to be dubbed the Pillars.
Sentinel derived this technology from so-called “Space Bridge” generators installed on certain automatons which allowed them to traverse across worlds with ease by ripping holes through the fabric of space. All Primes were built with advanced versions of these generators installed within them, so all Sentinel had to do in order to study this technology was remove his own and deconstruct it. What he produced as a result was a method of transporting the entirety of Cybertron through a giant wormhole that could lead to any point in the galaxy by using the Pillars as markers which would need to be brought to the location in space Cybertron was to be brought to. These Pillars were just re-engineered Space Bridge generators that could combine their outputs into one beam that could open a wormhole to Cybertron due to the Pillars being remotely connected to a waypoint on the planet.
The Knights did not favor this course of action, but still decided to give it a shot as they had come to realize there was truth to Sentinel’s claims that their proposed holy war could very well lead to their annihilation. The one issue with Sentinel’s plan related to the matter of how the Knights would go about making it deep into uncharted space with the Pillars, though a solution was eventually found. Fast paced exploration of the universe had fallen out of favor among the Creators who had now begun to take a much more gradual approach backed up by military might, but the Knights decided they would offer to revitalize the old method by becoming crusaders and exploring the universe not to enforce the doctrines on new worlds, rather only to map it for greater coordination in future conquests. They requested an audience with their creators to propose this idea, and a transport ship came to them and brought them to the Citadel where the Council resided — those who were revered as immortals as they had lived for millions of years.
The Council was delighted with this request, calling the Knights the next great crusaders and ordering for a starship to be built for them at once. This expedition was seen as the first of a new wave, so it was deemed the Sentinel Prime Expedition after the leader of the Knights. Once they received their new knight ship, the Knights discreetly loaded it with the Pillars before departing Cybertron at light speed using the ship’s five dark matter drives. These drives could not run forever as they needed to be routinely refueled, and just after a refueling session that took place after the ship had just crossed through its fourteenth galaxy, the Knights started receiving feedback on their communications instruments. It was nothing intelligible at first, just white noise, but the captain still had the ship be taken out of light speed to investigate the origins of it.
The captain, called Credulus, first attempted to make contact with the unknown force by sending it a message, but in response the ship received the exact same message. Credulus’s next move was to track down the unknown force, eventually finding it in the form of a large metallic cube floating through space. Once it was brought aboard the ship Credulus walked up to inspect it, whereupon he touched it and instantly the glyphs encoded in the automatons systems were burned into the outer layer of the Cube, with a shockwave then erupting from it that turned a wide variety of equipment into automatons of many different sizes. These automatons were strange as they appeared more monstrous than what the Creators had built and also lacked consciousness, instead acting like drones, but this mattered not to the Knights. In their optics, they had just been granted the ark of their covenant with the universe, thereby providing definitive proof that they were indeed part of the chosen species.
The strange nature of what this cube produced was explained away as being the pure automaton form as the universe intended it, with their creators instead having been the ones who failed to model the Knights in the same way because they had lacked divine revelation. Moving right along, Credulus had the Cube stowed away and the expedition was completed, as it had made it well a ways into uncharted space. The Pillars were set up and Cybertron was brought through the wormhole successfully, inspiring a revolution among the enslaved races still within the empire who correctly observed this to be a successful act of defiance. The Cube, eventually called the AllSpark, never forgot the expedition as it had observed the Knight Ship achieve an increase in its Energon’s viability due to the ship using dark matter as fuel to travel through space at light speed. The AllSpark had initially detected the Knight Ship as it was traveling across higher dimensions, only leaving them after it disengaged its dark matter drives to investigate the signal that the AllSpark had been sending out.
Having never let go of its fascination with what the Knight Ship had achieved, when the AllSpark found itself attending an astronomy lecture at Princeton University due to being reluctantly trapped inside the mind of Samuel James Witwicky, it took the time to read a short textbook to discover what humans knew of the subject. Within it, the AllSpark found that humans believed energy was equivalent to mass times the velocity of light multiplied by the power of two, which was correct when it came to three dimensional space, but the author of this equation made no mention of the other seventeen dimensions where the equation had to be different. Hoping to enlighten the feebleminded organics before it, the AllSpark took control of Samuel and attempted to communicate to the class the achievements of the Sentinel Prime expedition that would contradict their understanding of reality, but Samuel broke free of its control before it could finish.