I attended a talk on scared geometry the other day. Interesting stuff.
During the talk, the talker bought up a point which has been playing on my mind ever since and thought id post it on here in order to expand/elabourate on.

The point in question was about dimensions.
He was talking about how, if we were to dip our fingers into the plane of a 2d universe, then to someone looking down at this, they would see 5 circles, however, the 2d beings would only see the 5 cirles as 5 lines. i.e they would only see 1 dimension. So 2d beings can only percieve 1 dimension, thats 1 less than the dimetion they live in.
So, with that in mind he claimed that being as we can only percive 3dimensions, we are actually 4d beings!!!

What do you guys make of this?

There is alot of talk out there saying that the 4th dimesion is actually time. But i would say that we can percieve time to an extent, although this is a subjective perception, we can still say whether something took a long time or a short time.
Would a 5d being be able to see time as we see length and width, and can he therefore time travel?

Obviously all speculative stuff, but just some ideas that have been floating around in my head since brotherman threw this idea up in the air.

Would be interested to hear yalls thoughts on this.

with the 4th dimension thing i really think we are yes. every time Ive tripped out and had amazing insight into what i perceived as other dimensions Ive always found it natural to talk as if it was the 5th and 6th dimensions and not the 4th, talking about it as if the 4th dimension is somehow special but we cant feel it. its just as you say. 4th dimensional beings perceive only 3 dimensions. but they are living in the 4th dimension. more or less: they ARE the 4th dimension and need to stop controlling themselves.

So how do you feel about the people who say the 4th dimesion is time?
Like i say, i would argue that we sort of can percieve time, so are we sort of 5d beings, or does it not count as we cannot percive it as something solid which makes up our reality.
Man this is a head trip!

Are you sure? That doesn't seem right to me. They would have to be able to move around somehow, they are still 2D creatures.

I mean, technically speaking, all we really "see" in a 3D world, is a 2D representation of it. But we still exist in it as three dimensions. We are able to percieve depth and realize that it is in fact 3D. I don't think it's correct to judge our existence by what we see, rather than how we interact with it. Perhaps a 2D creature would able to percieve length and width, even though they only "technically" see 1 of the two represented.

Well this is what i thought when he said it, but the more i think about it the more its true. Even if they were to view a cube from the corner onwards, it would still only apprear as a line despite the fact that they would be looking at two sides. A singls line from 1 point to another, is 1dimension!

Right but they would be able to move about this line. They would realize, "ok if I move sideways the line changes, and if I move forward it changes." They would be able to navigate around this line, and therefor have a sense of both it's length and width.

Just like if we look at box from an angle. When we move side to side, different parts of the box are visible which gives us a sense of its depth. We can also move in such a way that only the length and width are visible.

Agreed, but no matter how much they move around it, surely its still going to appear as a single line isnt it?

Like you say, we can look at a box head on, change our angle of view and get a sense of its depth, different parts of the box become visible and the box will look different. but to a flat lander it will still remain as a line.

I duuno, i guess its difficult to get our head around being as we are not 2d beings. Its like the ant who walks on a moibus strip. He would feel like the road never ends, when in fact its just a stip of paper.

So are you saying that you dont think we are 4d?

http://www.veoh.com/brow...al/watch/v589221QEEhaFwc

i see what you are saying soulman and i agree that we are (as we currently are) 4th dimensional beings. time is a concept that we can work with but not control....

...but when i imbibe the spice, my "dimensionality" increases exponentially.... perhaps, even, to the ever-illusive TENTH dimension!! enjoy the vid!

LOVE AND GRATITUDE!!

Soulman, if you haven't seen the Carl Sagan series "Cosmos" yet, you should really check it out!!!

Here is a link to a thread where we were discussing this same topic a while back & there are a number of really good links in the first post to a site where you can watch all of the "Cosmos" episodes.

Then later in that same thread, I also posted a few links to some videos talking about "time as the 4th dimension".
The guy in these other videos is no Carl Sagan, but he does a great job of explaining this theory!!
Here is a link to that post.

This stuff is hard to wrap you mind around at first, but fascinating to say the least!

Cheers!
WS

Yeah man its certainly a head trip.
Thanks for the links though guys. I will be sure to check em out at some point over the weekend.

4th dimension is time, yes. but its the same as any other dimension. Think about it.

We experience only one sliver..or slice of time at any single moment, so it creates & defines a boundary to our reality, thus we can not truly perceive it for what it is as a whole...only slices of it.
The same way a 2-dimensional being can not truly perceive of us (as 3-dimensional), but only slices of whatever part of the 3-dimensional object is passing through the 2-dimensional plane.

Think of an apple passing though a flat piece of paper, from top to bottom...When the apple is resting on the top of the paper, a 2-D flat being on the paper, could only see 4 circular things...the 4 bottom "feet" of the apple.
Then as the apple begins to pass down through the flat paper, the 2-D being would see the 4 circles grow wider & wider, until they formed together, into one large circle & it would continue to change size & relative shape as the apple passes through the paper.
Until the circle seen in 2-D started to get smaller again & as the top of the apple passes through the paper, the flat circle would suddenly jump to a tiny dot as the stem passes through...then the apple would seem to disappear out of that 2-D, flat plane, as it ended up completely in the other side of the paper.

Now think of each moment we witness in time throughout our lives, as one slice of time.
(Exactly like a flip-book cartoon...or even film for a movie...when played together they look like seamless motion.)
Time as one whole thing...from your birth, to your death.
You are a 3-dimensional being & time...as a 4th Dimensional object is passing through your reality all around you but you are only able to perceive it one slice...or frame...at a moment.

Exactly like the 2-D being on the paper experiencing only flat slices of the 3-D apple, as it passed through his 2-D reality. He could never see the apple for what it truly was.


Another good example:
Imagine a flat being, moving along the surface of a giant round planet.
He can not see that the planet is round, & as he move forward, he thinks he is moving along a flat plane.
But he never reaches an edge & if he keeps moving forward long enough, he will end up back wear he started!

Because of it's size & his relation to it, he can not see that the planet is round...only that it is flat...but he can think about it & figure out that there is a dimension beyond his own, that is shaping the reality of his 2 dimensions.
The 3rd dimension is taking his flat circle & pushing depth into it, creating a sphere.
But the 2-D being can't see that 3rd dimension for what it is, because it is part of what is creating & shaping the boundary's of his reality...it's beyond him.

Time is exactly the same to us as 3rd dimensional beings!!
Time creates & shapes the boundary's of our 3-D reality...so we can't see it for what it truly is as a whole, we can only think about it & figure out that there is a dimension beyond ours that is creating & shaping the boundaries our this one!

A 3-D cube is a square (2-D's) with right angles to itself making it a 3-D square...a cube.
A 4-D cube (a Tesseract is only a shadow of this 4-d object) is a cube moving in a direction at right angles to itself.

Here is a video showing how this could work.
Here is another good one! Part 1 Part 2

So time seems to be a component of the 4th dimension, as motion over time would allow a 3-d object to have right angles to itself.

Also interesting, is that a 3-D object will cast a 2-D shadow & a 2-D object will cast a 1-D shadow. (try it!)
So it is logical to think that a 4-D object would actually cast a 3-D shadow!!



WS

^^^
Yeah thanks for the info bro.
I watched that Carl Sagan stuff which explains it well.
It works well on paper, but its just quite hard to get your head round.
I like his demonstration of the teseract as a shadow.

A 3D object casts a 2D shadow so if I like to think our bodies and the world are 3D shadows of some indescribable 4D structure.

I see what your saying, but i dont think we are shadows, in the same way that i dont think the shadows we cast are beings in a 2d universe.

But this is something I have been thinking alot about lately. Like the more i think about it, the more I see that time is the 4th dimesion. Like think about when we talk about time...we talk about the LENGTH of time...or how LONG did it take!!!! We talk about it as if it is a physical object, a dimension. I guess the difficulty is, or at least for me anyway is because its not a dimension that we can see or touch.

So just to keep on the same theme of the thread, do you think a 5d being can see time as a physical thing?
I have had experiences where time has collapsed, and i couldnt reemeber if i had done something already that I was supposed to be doing in the future. It was really strange.

A spatial (key word there) 4th dimension is separate and different to time (helpful wiki - This fourth spatial dimension is a concept distinct from the time dimension in spacetime, since time is functionally very different from any of the spatial dimensions; formally, spacetime is not an Euclidean space but a Minkowski space.) Interesting points though.

I like to think of it like this: the 4th dimension (time) encompasses everything physical (3d). It represents everything that PHYSICALLY has happened, is happening and will happen, so maybe.... higher dimensions have something to do with spacial probability?

Maybe time could be a representation or a measurement of the 4th dimension. some link between all matter in the universe?

There are more bodies and more dimensions we are contained in.
Don't be foolish to believe in only 4 dimensions.

who said anything about only believing in 4 dimensions?

Just becasue people have a discussion about 4d space doesnt mean that they are assuming that that is all there is..callig people foolish like that I think is not going to get you too far my friend.

You assume wrongly, i would call people foolish.
I had absolutely no intention in doing so.
If you like to play the victim role. Go on...