So I've stepped up how much I discuss things like this, and as a result I've had some really interesting suggestions from others which I'd like to share. This one I owe to Kick Kennedy, who owes her thought to "Flatland" - a short book.
In this book, they present a 2D world with a 2D person that lives in a square. Imagine a 3D sphere now passing through his world. That sphere would translate into the 2D world as a series of circles small to large to small.
So, if a 4D object were to pass through our 3D world, it would probably be distorted like that. Time certainly appears to be a good candidate, but I am very dubious that we will ever learn to travel through time because if anyone in the future figures this out, they probably already would have come back to today and we'd know. But just because humans can't travel through time, doesn't disqualify it from being the fourth dimension. I wonder what other possible dimensions exist?
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3 comments:
This is a concept that is useful when you're considering other universes beyond our own, even in 3 regular dimensions. If we are even smaller than we realize (say our universe is the head of a pin in a larger one), there might be no way we can correctly visualize what's going on up there beyond where we can currently see. Good idea bringing this up to inform our thinking...
hrm... Couldn't you think of dimensions then as a category of the mind?
Imagine your sphere in the 2d world again. Now imagine the 2d person stepping on to it (err... intersecting it). As the 2d person moves up it is intersecting a series of progressively smaller circles.
I like the idea of dimensions as categories of our mind - some philosophers suggest that the physical world does not even exist beyond our own creation of it.
Also, I was thinking that memory really allows us to sense the passing of time and without it we would be unable to perceive it. If you think about this by way of analogy - sight allows us to sense the other 3 dimensions while walking allows us to move through the space. Then are we missing a component that might allow us to move through time or are some dimensions like time perhaps in a different category and you cannot move through them?
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