Rotating Across the Fourth Dimension

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.

Rotating Across the Fourth Dimension

Postby ParadoxJuice » Thu Mar 12, 2009 8:29 pm

Well, I haven't seen anything like this here, so I'm gonna post a way that I think might help us understand the 4thD very well. It is based on the idea that our minds can simply only picture 3Ds, so what you do is get rid of the y dimension and replace it with the w dimension (btw, I am assuming that y is forward/backwards, z is up/down, and x is left/right, if I am incorrect, please correct me, and I'll edit this).

Note: You may have to switch between your 'cosmos' self, who is as normal as always, and you 'tetra' self, who is rotated 4Dally.

Anyways, just look at the back wall of the room that you are in and imagine a large oval. This is your point of view from the 4thD (from now on, reffered to WPOV). Imagine that there is nothing, except for what is in your WPOV. This means that you are standing on an empty ground, and that you can only see what is in your WPOV. Your WPOV is 2D. If someone (who was still in the 'cosmos' plane of existance, the one that you are ACTUALLY in, not the one you are imagining yourself in) were to stand in your invisible POV, then you would see their inards, or at least a 'slice' (a 2D image, search it if you are new to 4D stuff) of whatever organs were intersecting your WPOV. Now, switch back to your 'cosmos' self and imagine that the WPOV would move forwards, towards a wall, until it went inside of the wall. Switch back to your tetra self. Your WPOV is still where it was, but it now depicts a different image-an imagine of the inside of that wall. By doing this, you can move x,y,z, and w.

Try and imagine yourself using this to move all 4Ds in a few different scenarios, until you are used to it. I should mention this now-your WPOV is actually infinitely expanding across the x and z dimensions, but that you can't see the whole thing at once-if a wall was expanding out infinitely, would you be able to see the whole thing? If your tetra self steps back (across w), then you will be able to see more of the cosmos, but you won't be able to see all of it.

So, now we can try and use this to imagine a complex structure, expanding in 4Ds. Imagine your cosmos self, with the WPOV of your tetra self infront of you, and a wall just behind it. Now imagine that the WPOV moves forward, until it is now halfway through the wall. Good. What your tetra self will see is the WPOV depicting the insides of that wall-but, what if this wall expanded out w? We will call it the tetrawall. Now, as your tetra self sees the WPOV move into the tetrawall, they will notice that another piece of the tetrawall, expanding away from the WPOV now appears. This is the part of the wall that expands w. If there was no tetrawall, but a tetraslope, then that one cube (or rectangular prism) shape will shrink downwards, eventually dissapearing.

Now this can help us imagine 4D structures. Now, things get complicated, but some of you geniuses will understand why this should work, as you seem to be good at comparing the 1stD and the 2ndD, the 2ndD and the 3rdD, and using this information to understand the 4thD. So, we will switch over to the life of a Flatlander, exploring the 3rdD like this. Imagine the Flatman rotating across the 3rdD, and then stepping back a bit. Now, as you should know, Flatmen see 1D, not 2D like we do. So, if you can imagine it, they would see their entire world flatened down to a line, which is their POV. As other Flatmen stepped through this line, the Flatman would see their innards (your with me here, right?). Just imagine the Flatman somehow moving left and right as it did this, how it would see a 3D wall as it passed by it (this wall, by the way, is not infinite, nor has corners), just as we passed by the tetrawall.
ParadoxJuice
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