Fine. I'll read Flatland again.
this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2024
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thanks my brain was itching for surreal posts fromt he nth dimension
If I were a 4d being for a day, I would rotate my enemies in 3d space until they're exactly where they started but a mirrored version of themselves, so it appears to them as if I've mirrored their entire existence.
They would slowly die of malnutrition as the chiral molecules in their diet (such as glucose) would no longer meet the requirements of their body
It's precisely rotation through the higher dimension that cannot be undone in the lower one. So.. nice thought, I think?
"in 3d space" refers to the enemies, not the rotation. I should have been more clear
Little Bunny Foo Foo, I don't wanna see you ...
Well, that's something I haven't heard in a long, long time.
There's a game on steam that lets you be in 4d space, but only a slice at a time. It's super trippy to play
isn't being in a slice of 4d space at a time just normal life?
Is that the one that works in VR? Apparently the effect works even better when you have stereo vision.
I was actually thinking of 4D Toys.
There's 4d golf too by code parade.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2147950/4D_Golf/ https://youtube.com/@codeparade
That looks super trippy
Honestly it's pretty funny to me how people think 4d is all strange and terrifying, when in fact it's (to the degree that it can be said to actually exist, since it's theoretical/mathematical) pretty "simple" and just headache inducing to try to wrap your head around.
like your mind wouldn't shatter from being moved through 4d space, things would just look completely nonsensical and impossible, it's no more lovecraftian than subatomic physics. It's just Kronk saying "by all accounts, it doesn't make sense".
No, being rotated in the 4th dimension and plopped back down into the third dimension would be horrible and it wouldn't surprise me if it killed you. For one, it would absolutely feel like a Lovecraftian nightmare. Your right arm is now your left. Your heart is in a different side of your chest. The "you" you see in the mirror will be the "you" you've seen in photographs. But look into chirality in chemistry. Your body would suddenly have tons of molecules that are a mirror image of what they should be and work with the mirror images of molecules they used to. Everything already in you would get flipped, but you might be on a ticking clock if you aren't able to get the chiral opposites of necessary amino acids.
From your perspective, your body wouldn't really change. It's the handedness / chirality of the universe that would be flipped. It's an odd thing to think about...
Well in that case you starve a slow death of malnutrition as your body is unable to properly process any of the food you eat, unless it's also rotated 180 degrees along the 4th axis
I debated on what it would be like before I posted and I think you're right. It would be more like being "in the mirror" sort of. Everyone would look different to you and you'd look different from what people remember. You'd need to learn to read and write in reverse.
but you could get high as shit on a Vicks inhaler.
I saw a video on higher dimensional geometry the other day and it said something at the end that gave me the following question: How do we know for sure that anything we perceive in our 3D world is actually only in 3D and not simply what we can perceive of higher dimensions?
Because we see no evidence of a 4th spatial dimension. So if there is a fourth dimension, our universe doesn't seem to have access to it.
If there are higher dimensions, say the extra seven asserted by String Theory, then we have breadth (thickness?) along each axis that is non zero. The higher-order string theory dimensions (which communicate particle information like gravity) are tightly rolled up.
Brian Greene uses the metaphore of an ant on a wire who can move along the wire freely, but can't go far laterally. They may be so small that our quantum bits can't drift anywhere, so our liver doesn't abandon us drift along a high-level axis.
If there are flat higher level dimensions, then either a force or some kind of membrane would have to exist to keep our blood from leaking.
That said, when we have pure elements, or even pure minerals or chemicals, they retain the same density (mass to volume, sometimes affected by temperature) which suggests nothing is hiding away in other dimensions whenever we take measurements. If there is room along higher axes for unseen activity, it doesnt bug us enough to work out consistent properties.
We actually kinda do perceive a fourth dimension: time. Sure, we infer it from our memories and come up with cause and effect relationships to help us understand it. But we do know it's there.
Okay, sure, but the question still remains, how do you know that there isn't some 5th dimension for some random objects.
I think that's one of the theories for explaining dark matter (i personally like the idea because it can also possibly address why gravity seems to be so much weaker of a fundamental force, but i'm a chemist, not a physicist, so take that with a grain of salt).
We don't! When I was younger I had a theory that the brain is a 3D representation of an organ that exists in a higher dimension. Granted, I had (and still have) no relevant expertise to properly speculate on how that could work, but it was fun to think about.
Death's end moment
Would you not just be moved to a different time? Like the 4th dimension is time right? So you'd just be in another time period, in a different place.
No, time is not the same kind of dimension as space.
I think the thing here that confuses a lot of people is that we need to use movement over time to help our brains get some sort of grasp on how 4 spatial dimensions could work.
Think of it like how document scanners work: the scanner can only see a thin line, so to read the whole document it has to pass that line over the paper, which takes time.
On the other hand you have our eyes which can see a 2d plane, so we can see the entire paper at once, no time needed.
So the time needed to scan the paper isn't part of the paper's 2-dimensionality, but it's needed to represent it in 1 dimension.
In the same way we couldn't directly perceive things in 4d, but we could rotate a 4d item through our 3d slice until we've seen all angles of it, and then try to build a mental approximation of how it actually looks.
A concrete example: to map a 3d sphere into 2d, you'd move it through the 2d plane which results in it looking like a circle that appears out of nowhere, grows until it reaches the widest part, then shrinks again until it dissapears.
Similarily, a 4d hypersphere passing through our 3d space would look like a sphere that appears out of nowhere, grows and shrinks, and then disappears again.
That's hard to wrap my head around lol, but thank you for the explanation
No, Time is 1 dimension for us. It's 1 temporal dimension, not the same as a spacial dimension. When you see someone say 3+1D or 3D+1D, that usually refers to 3 spacial dimensions, 1 temporal dimension.
That depends: In a certain way, we are already 4D creatures, with three spatial and one time dimension. However, in these contexts it‘s often useful to only refer to spatial dimensions. The 4D creature then has 4 spatial dimensions, and shares our time dimension.
But maybe its four spatial dimensions are our three spatial dimensions plus our time, and its time is something else completely? Then, by rotating you, it could place your head at a different time than your feet. But that also breaks causality and stuff.
There are theories that suggest up to 11 spatial dimensions exist like some string theories.
Ten dimensions plus time in string theory.
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