Flight In 4D?

Ideas about how a world with more than three spatial dimensions would work - what laws of physics would be needed, how things would be built, how people would do things and so on.

Flight In 4D?

Postby PatrickPowers » Mon Nov 04, 2024 2:38 pm

Suppose you have space with time and four perpendicular Euclidean dimensions. Assume that atoms exist and the laws of physics are the same. This doesn't seem likely, it's just intellectual exercise. Then assume things on Earth have the same number of atoms they have in 4D. The main result which surprised me is that things of the same mass have much smaller dimensions but a much greater surface area. We measure surface area by the number of atoms exposed on the surface, which is 3D. People of 100kg mass would be about three millimeters tall but have maybe a thousand times more surface area than do we. With the surface-to-mass ratio a thousand times greater than ours the world would be in some ways similar to that experienced by our insects. The terminal velocity of falling would be about 7 mph.

So...could winged elephants fly? No. It might be possible to get enough lift from wings but flight would take too much energy. But today I ran into a spider web and had an idea. What about the "ballooning" that spiders do? They spin a web into space then are carried away by the wind. Some bigger animal doesn't have to spin anything, just securely attach enough thread to its body. That might work.

Looking at it from another angle, gnats would have maybe a hundred times the surface area they have in 3D. I think that would make holding on to moisture such a problem that gnats couldn't exist. East Asia has biting gnats. Tokyo has few gnats but their bite is amazingly obnoxious for a microscopic creature. I wouldn't miss them.

Under these assumptions Earth gravity is a million times stronger. But let's ignore that for now, shall we?
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Re: Flight In 4D?

Postby PatrickPowers » Tue Nov 05, 2024 10:30 am

The more I think about ballooning with string the more I realize I don't understand how it works even here in 3D. So no chance of making sense of it in 4D.
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