hi :D

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.

hi :D

Postby Keiji » Mon Nov 10, 2003 6:53 pm

Hello, I'm new to this forum... not the site tho :D

All this gives people a headache :roll:

If only we did live in the 4th dimension...
* we'd never need road junctions that had bridges, so they would never fall down
* you would be able to fit loads and loads of boards in a computer, (boards are plane-shaped, in 3d there is only 1 direction that they an be "stacked" in, think of line-shape boards) so they would be much faster
* you would be able to walk round rivers... 8)
* a whole 4 dimensional book would only be as thick as a 3d piece of paper (becuase a 3d book can be extruded into 4d space with a very little thickness)
* you could have an infinately high block of flats without it falling over (if it was infinitly high in the w direction as opposed to the y direction)

Can't think of any more at the moment.
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Postby alkaline » Mon Nov 10, 2003 8:23 pm

welcome to the forum!

- i hadn't thought about road bridges in the fourth dimension yet, but you are right. All fourth dimension roads can lay flat on the ground, even in a giant freeway intersection, because the roads can just go past each other. In the same way, many other constructions wouldn't need to be lifted off of the ground - but i can't think of any specific ones just yet.

- also, for processors, since beings in the fourth dimension have access to all points in a 3d surface at once, they could build 3d processors rather easily, just as we build 2d processors. Interconnections would be much less of a barrier to 4d computing, because paths can go around each other easily. Processors could be much smaller and more efficient.

- another way to make 4d books is to make them into hypercubes with cubic pages - their size would be a lot smaller. The pages could have rows, columns, and a third type of "row/column". A whole book could probably fit on a page, if it was large enough.

- i'm not sure what you mean by "high", because generally high refers to the y direction. But you are right that you wouldn't have to build much upwards. If you did though, you could have an extremely compact city.

it's very nice to see someone with new insights into the workings of the fourth dimension! i'm looking forward to seeing what other insights you may have.
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Postby Keiji » Mon Nov 10, 2003 8:34 pm

* Well, I can usually imagine 4d things easily by ignoring height - just like you can get a picture of what a complex road junction looks like by looking at a 2d map, you could think of a 4d road junction by picturing a 3d "map". If you ignore height, which is the hardest dimension to make use of because of gravity, it becomes much easier to think in 4d - you could think of roads stacked one on top of the other (which would be relatively very easy to build in 4d), or you could think of 4d rivers that fly through the air, or imagine the shape of a 4d country as a "blob" suspended in mid-air.

* Ooh. I hadn't thought of that. It would be like they could make one whole stack of planar circuitboards at once, as easily as it is for us to make one whole planar circutboard at once.

* This would make it as hard to read for them as it would be for us to read a book the size of a postage stamp - or they would have to have novels millions of pages long! :wink:

* High as in the w dimension, as, referring to above, I said that I tend to ignore height when thinking of the 4th dimensions.
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Postby Polyhedron Dude » Mon Nov 10, 2003 9:02 pm

bobxp wrote:* Well, I can usually imagine 4d things easily by ignoring height - just like you can get a picture of what a complex road junction looks like by looking at a 2d map, you could think of a 4d road junction by picturing a 3d "map". If you ignore height, which is the hardest dimension to make use of because of gravity, it becomes much easier to think in 4d - you could think of roads stacked one on top of the other (which would be relatively very easy to build in 4d), or you could think of 4d rivers that fly through the air, or imagine the shape of a 4d country as a "blob" suspended in mid-air.


I like to think this way too. By the way, rivers would not only flow down hill, but would take on a whirlpool like spin. There's also another type of body of water which I call a "laver" - these would be flowing planar shaped "lake-rivers" and would likely be in between canyons - they would look like interconnected twisted flowing planes. There may also be something that could take use of the height dimension - a light beacon - these could be errected to help people find their way around if they get lost - very likely in 4 dimensions.

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Postby alkaline » Tue Nov 11, 2003 2:19 pm

Polyhedron Dude wrote:I like to think this way too. By the way, rivers would not only flow down hill, but would take on a whirlpool like spin. There's also another type of body of water which I call a "laver" - these would be flowing planar shaped "lake-rivers" and would likely be in between canyons - they would look like interconnected twisted flowing planes. There may also be something that could take use of the height dimension - a light beacon - these could be errected to help people find their way around if they get lost - very likely in 4 dimensions.


i was wondering what phenomena would cause a river to spin. I assume by that you mean a helix or a spiral shape. Would it be the same thing that causes rivers to snake in the third dimension? (ie, the the water eroding the land in weaker spots causing the river to change shape?)

I heard somewhere that toilets on the north hemisphere of earth spin one direction and toilets on the other hemisphere spin the other direction. supposedly this is because of the spin of earth. So, would rivers on the north hemisphere of a 4d planet spiral one direction, while the other ones on the other hemisphere spiral the other direction?

I'm not sure about the laver idea - it seems to me that a flowing mass of water would dig itself a grove which would end up forming a linear shape. The same thing happens in the third dimension - we don't get big planes of flowing water.
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Postby alkaline » Wed Nov 12, 2003 5:21 pm

note: the posts to this topic about getting lost in the dimensions were split to a separate topic:

http://tetraspace.alkaline.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=15
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Postby Polyhedron Dude » Tue Nov 18, 2003 7:29 am

alkaline wrote:i was wondering what phenomena would cause a river to spin. I assume by that you mean a helix or a spiral shape. Would it be the same thing that causes rivers to snake in the third dimension? (ie, the the water eroding the land in weaker spots causing the river to change shape?)


Rivers would be cylindrical (very long cylindrical) - they would likely spin in the same way water flowing down a drain does - since the river has two lateral dimensions (perpendicular to flowing direction) - a spinning motion sure is possible. The faster it flows, the faster it may spin.

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Postby alkaline » Fri Nov 21, 2003 3:03 pm

this spinning would bring a whole new dimension to sea-sickness. Imagine trying to travel down a river with the boat spinning the whole time. It would be similar to riding in a boat that rotated the whole time it was traveling on its path. In addition to the spinning, you have the forward and back rocking. Doesn't it already make you queezy?
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Postby Keiji » Fri Nov 21, 2003 5:23 pm

ah but that wouldn't happen - remember you don't travel on the outside of the water, you travel on it's surface, unimaginable in 3 dimensions.
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Postby alkaline » Fri Nov 21, 2003 5:38 pm

what wouldn't happen, the spinning? It is possible, and you can see why if you use the analogy method.

First think of Fred's view of a 3d boat on water. Imagine the boat is a triangle and the water is a square. He has to imagine a square with a triangle within it. In realmspace, all of the points within the triangle make contact with the water, but Fred can't imagine this. He can only picture the water making contact with the edges of the triangle. The boat can rotate, and to Fred this would just look like the triangle turning within the square.

For us to imagine a 4d boat, we can picture a cone within a cube. All of the points within the cone make contact with the water, but we can't imagine this. We can only see the surface of the cone making contact with the water. The 4d boat can both spin along its symmetry axis, and turn its orientation. As it spins or turns, the contact points it makes with the water change. Thus, the boat can spin around its axis as it is traveling forward on the water.
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Postby Keiji » Fri Nov 21, 2003 11:49 pm

/me is confused
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Postby alkaline » Sat Nov 22, 2003 12:30 am

well i want to help you understand it, but you have to tell me what specifically you don't understand so that i can elaborate or try to explain better.
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dutch proverbs and sculpting

Postby Aale de Winkel » Sat Nov 22, 2003 9:01 am

The dime has not fallen yet is taken from a dutch proverb, which is used when you just haven't taken up the point I was making, Or to quote another proverb "for the trees you don't see the forrest". You are simply thus used to our normal writing that you don't see the simularities.
for me, being an artist at hart, words are nothing more then "linquistic paint". A sculpture might convey to me in seconds where a writer takes a full page to convey to me the same thing, certainly when he has to leave halve of his colours behind (just to allow simpletonians (excuse me for using my paint) to catch up who didn't understand the sculpture also.
also when i am faced with ... ---- ... I know that someone is in distress, though I need to look up 'l' to wrtie my name so currently it is .- .- ? .
How to write mynae into scultpting I have no idea since they don't convey letters but feeling, so Tionans may "read" morse code and latin letters, while we need to feel around "sculpter parcs", Writers might use pictures of scultings intertwined in there text, however pictures are notused that way and rather lengthy desciptive sections must be used.
Writngs and pictures don't mix easily due to the size of the letters, though you use her already emticons in a certain analogous matter, current options seem to be too small to make some sentence other then a closing :lol:
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Postby Polyhedron Dude » Mon Dec 08, 2003 6:49 am

alkaline wrote:this spinning would bring a whole new dimension to sea-sickness. Imagine trying to travel down a river with the boat spinning the whole time. It would be similar to riding in a boat that rotated the whole time it was traveling on its path. In addition to the spinning, you have the forward and back rocking. Doesn't it already make you queezy?


Imagine a tetronian roller coaster - you could be spinning as well as flying through all sorts of loops, corksqrews, and various 4-D twists and turns :o

BOY - I want to ride it!!! - gonna hafta wait till I'm in Heaven!

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