NEED URGENT HELP!

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NEED URGENT HELP!

Postby Krickette » Wed May 18, 2005 11:22 pm

OK, listen up all you smart people! I need help. Is there any way to describe the 4th dimension in short, concise sentences, involving as little geometry as possible (yuck)? Probably not. Here's the deal, I have a project on this for my Advanced Topics in math class (although from the looks of it, I should have it in Analytic Geometry >.<) And I need to explain to the class what the 4th dimension is. Anyone care to help? I was enjoying the cartoons on cool dude's web site, but I get confused easily when math stops involving formulas, structure, normalcy, etc...Help? I have to have this done for tomorrow. I know, I know, I should have done it earlier, but our teachers are insane and have decided to cram as much work as possible onto us two weeks before finals...
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(helping myself) I just found a cool site, that explains in terms I can understand. I know about (x,y,z) So this site says for a 4th deminsion you have (x,y,z,t). So (in a giant-muffin-shaped-coconut-scented-nutshell) Is it like as the crow flies? Like, I could tell you to walk foward 3 paces, left 2, then climb a ladder. That's three. Where's the 4th? Is that like the diagonal thru the air that we can't travel through? Maybe? Possibly?
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Hmmm...ok...so is it like being able to see thru things that are already 3-D? I dunno. I like the crow flies idea...I don't think even the teacher knows what this stuff is, I can probobly get away with B-S-ing it...Help?

Edit by iNVERTED: combined posts. Please use the edit button in future.
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Postby timespace » Wed May 18, 2005 11:44 pm

there are plenty of sites out there (this site being one of them) that explain the 4th dimension...it cannot be simply put, or summarized...it takes a great deal of understanding as well.
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Postby Krickette » Wed May 18, 2005 11:46 pm

I know there are sites...I've found a lot of them...I just don't get it. I don't learn well by reading (partially because in my state it was not required to teach kids <i>how</i> to read...) I'm more of a "go touch the hot-wire fence for yourself and find out" kinda person, but you can't do that with this...I just wanna know if i have the right idea.
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Postby timespace » Wed May 18, 2005 11:54 pm

well basically you're on the right idea...xyz make up our 3 dimensional universe, and anything 4-d will have a fourth dimension. It doesnt have to be t, it could be anything. There is absolutely no way to imagine the 4th dimension, however, because we are so reliant on our sight, which is entirely 2-d. ( we see 2d surfaces) Theres no easy way to explain it, but i think youve got the basic concept.

What state are you in that they dont require you to read??
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Postby Krickette » Thu May 19, 2005 12:03 am

Oh, when I was in elementary school, Louisiana was toying with different ideas of how to teach children to read. With our school (seeing as it was and is a regect school full of kids without potential *note the sarcasm*) they tryed teaching us to sight read. They never taught us how to read phonetically, and our class never properly mastered sight reading. It's baisically like when you look at the TV, you see a picture, my reading is like seeing all the green, blue, red dots all at once, recognizing the colors but not having any meaning behind them. All that jazz resulted in some weird sort of dyslexia where I can't write or read well, but I love numbers. Anyway, that's english, this is a math forum.

So, I *think* i get the concept...maybe...I just need to refine the points...
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Postby jinydu » Thu May 19, 2005 12:33 am

Krickette wrote:Help? I have to have this done for tomorrow.


Unfortunately for you, this is not the most active forum on the Internet. Don't expect a large number of posts in a single day.

Basically, you can think of four dimensional space as a natural generalization of lower dimensional spaces. You begin with the postulate that through any point, it is possible to draw four mutually perpendicular lines (or some equivalent formulation), and proceed to logically derive consequences of this assumption. For example, given two points in 4D:

(x1, y1, z1, w1) and (x2, y2, z2, w2)

The distance between the points is:

sqrt((x2 - x1)^2 + (y2 - y1)^2 + (z2 - z1)^2 + (w2 - w1)^2)

I could go on and on, but to get a precise answer, you'll have to provide a precise question.

P.S. I don't see anything particularly unusual about your posts. Plenty of users type far less grammatically.
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Postby Krickette » Sat May 21, 2005 5:49 pm

Thanks guys! I got an A on my project! It was fun watching the blank stares on my classmates faces when I had to teach them about it. The more I talked, the more I got it. I have to share with y'all something our future valedictorian said:

"Katie, there are definatly more dimensions, but there is no 4th dimension."

riiiiiiiiiight...it just skips right on to the 5th, lol! He was just talking about this one being a thoery and all, but I thought it was funny the way he said it.

(Oh, and when my power went out, it was because a hot air baloon hit a powerline at my church...2 ppl died, and now I feel bad for complaining...)
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Postby timespace » Tue May 24, 2005 10:31 pm

well good for you on your project...but your classmate is also partially correct. All of the higher dimensions other than we know of are purely theoretical. Said by this site, the fourth dimension is spatial, when many people also believe it could be time.

And yeah, the more you think about the fourth dimension, the more you'll understand it...at least thats how it works for me (and hopefully im not alone).
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Postby jinydu » Wed May 25, 2005 1:14 am

This forum (or at least its owner) does not claim that the fourth dimension is spatial; it does not even claim that a fourth spatial dimension exists. Instead, the primary purpose is to speculate about what it would be like if it did exist.
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Postby Chaos » Thu May 26, 2005 12:30 am

If you want to understand tetraspace, you'd best do it with words rather than pictures. Trying to imagine a tesseract is like trying to imagine a triangle with three right-angles. In fact, if you ever saw a tesseract, you'd probably feel sick because what you were seeing defies geometrical law.

If you really want to see a moving, controllable tesseract/hypercube/tetracube etc, go to http://www1.tip.nl/~t515027/hypercube.html for a cool Java program.
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Postby RQ » Tue Jun 21, 2005 3:20 pm

I don't know if this was ever a good visualization but imagine you are in a video game and someone is shooting you from behind.

Since it's not you, yet the person's bullet comes from a dimension that is perpendicular to the other "3" spatial dimensions (which are actually 2 but are a representation of 3), then that person's bullet comes from the 4th dimension.
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