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Thread: The 4th Dimension

  1. #1

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    College Grad!!! Jacob Roman's Avatar
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    The 4th Dimension

    I'm blown away that space can really have a 4th measurable unit that's not time, but a real unit! Introducing the tesseract
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesseract



    0 dimensions is a dot (1 component)
    1 dimension is a line (2 components)
    2 dimensions is square (4 components)
    3 dimensions is a cube (8 components)
    4 dimensions is a tesseract (16 components) or 2 cubes!



    If you unfold a cube, you get this:


    However if you unfold a tesseract you get this!


    And this was possible to pull off because 3D images can be projected to 2D, much like drawing a cube on a piece of paper. So this 4D shape was projected into 3D.

    Anyone up for making a 4D engine?

  2. #2
    Sinecure devotee
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    Re: The 4th Dimension

    Yeah, I never had any real interest in it. And other articles in early computer graphic magazine even gave graphical examples of higher order dimensions, i.e. 5,6 or 7. Never really made any practical sense to me. Even the table at the end of the wiki entry you linked to lists dimesions 2-10 and implies you can have any number of dimensions (n).

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    Super Moderator FunkyDexter's Avatar
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    Re: The 4th Dimension

    Anyone up for making a 4D engine?
    I've got a delorean you can put it in.
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    Superbly Moderated NeedSomeAnswers's Avatar
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    Re: The 4th Dimension

    Quote Originally Posted by FunkyDexter View Post
    I've got a delorean you can put it in.
    I didn't know Jaguar made deloreans now, or did you do a part ex?
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    Super Moderator Shaggy Hiker's Avatar
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    Re: The 4th Dimension

    Some of the laws of physics don't work mathematically in three dimensions. Some larger number is required, such as 8 or 11 (not sure if 8 works).

    I was working on a robot that could only perceive in two dimensions. It would be fully capable of living a life (assuming the brain ever became good enough to be self aware) perceiving only two dimensions. For example, all my furniture would have certain sizes. Some items of the same size would have radically different perceived weight, though. After all, the robot would perceive a short section of PVC pipe to be the same as a load bearing beam, but it would be able to move one and not the other (ideally).

    Stairs would be interesting for a 2D brain. It might well be possible for the robot to perceive stairs, though it wouldn't perceive them as a 3D object. It would perceive them as an area that has an ambiguous distance. A mechanism could then be built for the robot to climb the stairs. It would know that when it got to a stair, it had to do certain things over and over as long as there was a stair. It wouldn't know that it was going up or down, just that "if I see this type of thing, I can do these actions over and over, at the end of which, I am in a different universe." It would appear as a different universe, too. It would be able to map this new world, it just wouldn't have any necessary relationship to the world it had been inhabiting before it went through the "stair ritual."

    So, if a brain can perceive only two dimensions and be perfectly capable of functioning in this world, then why would that not also be true of a brain that could only perceive three dimensions? That doesn't mean that the "real world" has only three dimensions, it just means that the brain can only perceive three dimensions. Just as some odd things would happen for a brain that perceived only two dimensions living in a three dimension world, a brain that only perceived three dimensions while living in an n-dimensional world would also see odd things.

    One example would be my four post table. The 2D brain would perceive that table as four unattached items. It would then note that if it moved one of those items, the other three would shift immediately, and in predictable directions, but there would be no information passed between the object that was moved and the objects that moved on their own. Most objects would not behave this way. For most objects, if you moved them, no other object shifted unless it was contacted by the object that was moved, but there would be a few items where moving one moved the others. This would appear as spooky motion at a distance.
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  6. #6

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    Re: The 4th Dimension

    Stairs and tables in 4D would eventually end up looking like The Labrynth

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    Re: The 4th Dimension

    You might be interested in this recent research:
    Experiments Show The Effects of a Fourth Spatial Dimension

  8. #8

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    Re: The 4th Dimension

    Funny. Theres a 4D game for the PS4



    and now 4th dimensional toys?!!


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