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...willing your body to move in a direction that you've never even seen or experienced before?
That sounds hard to me. Maybe we should start out a little easier, say, with simply willing our senses to perceive motion in a direction that we've never experienced before. What does 4d motion look like? What do 4d vibrations sound like? (Great questions, gang!)
Maybe we could also try a concrete (*cough*) example, such as hurling your body at oblique angles through an oncoming vehicle, to avoid being run over and squished. What would that experience be like?
If 3d space is filled with terrain and obstacles, then it is quite reasonable to expect to have to deal with obstacles in 4d as well. It would be silly to just assume *unimpeded* motion along the 4th spatial dimension. You'd have to navigate your way around and through those obstacles as well. (Maybe even attempt oblique motion in 5d, but that just leads to 6d, 7d... Nd, where does it stop? What leads us to believe it would ever get anything but *more* complex?)
So the limiting factor is mainly one of increasing complexity. From the perspective of energy / matter itself, all motion is spinning, whirling, curving, as well as maintaining 3d-centric "straight" lines. The actual vectors of force and energy, mass and motion are already incredibly complex in 3d space, and just get more complicated in 4d+. (Einstein decided that matter accelerating in space actually *decreases* in mass, implying zero mass for anything moving at the speed of light [or a phase transition]. From a 4d perspective, it could just be that the overall density of energy/matter in 3d space (+ time) is what is changing. Maybe implying that moving at the speed of light is a condition for making the phase transition to moving in the 4th dimension [and thus having zero "mass"].)
It's no wonder we choose to organize our perceptions into merely 3 spatial dimensions, if only for convenience sake!
I imagine it must end up a lot like trying to take one fractal and then pour it through another one...
That sounds hard to me. Maybe we should start out a little easier, say, with simply willing our senses to perceive motion in a direction that we've never experienced before. What does 4d motion look like? What do 4d vibrations sound like? (Great questions, gang!)
Maybe we could also try a concrete (*cough*) example, such as hurling your body at oblique angles through an oncoming vehicle, to avoid being run over and squished. What would that experience be like?
If 3d space is filled with terrain and obstacles, then it is quite reasonable to expect to have to deal with obstacles in 4d as well. It would be silly to just assume *unimpeded* motion along the 4th spatial dimension. You'd have to navigate your way around and through those obstacles as well. (Maybe even attempt oblique motion in 5d, but that just leads to 6d, 7d... Nd, where does it stop? What leads us to believe it would ever get anything but *more* complex?)
So the limiting factor is mainly one of increasing complexity. From the perspective of energy / matter itself, all motion is spinning, whirling, curving, as well as maintaining 3d-centric "straight" lines. The actual vectors of force and energy, mass and motion are already incredibly complex in 3d space, and just get more complicated in 4d+. (Einstein decided that matter accelerating in space actually *decreases* in mass, implying zero mass for anything moving at the speed of light [or a phase transition]. From a 4d perspective, it could just be that the overall density of energy/matter in 3d space (+ time) is what is changing. Maybe implying that moving at the speed of light is a condition for making the phase transition to moving in the 4th dimension [and thus having zero "mass"].)
It's no wonder we choose to organize our perceptions into merely 3 spatial dimensions, if only for convenience sake!
I imagine it must end up a lot like trying to take one fractal and then pour it through another one...
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Re: Can you imagine...
Thu, October 16, 2003 - 6:40 AMRemember, too, that we are all in motion through time; but, like a moving train, most things we see are moving along with us so we tend to forget we are moving.
On the notion of mass moving at the speed of light, I thought it was the opposite: that as a body is accelerated its mass increases, so that a body moving at the speed of light has infinite mass... -
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Re: Can you imagine...
Wed, November 26, 2003 - 6:43 PMYep, mass *increases* and time *decreases* for bodies moving with a velocity close to the speed of light.
And Robert's right about thinking about everything moving along with us, it's key for thinking about a fourth dimension. What always helps me to picture something moving through a fourth dimension is remembering these couple'a steps:
- A point is usually defined as zero dimensional. it's just a point.
- Travel through one dimension is an infinite copy of points along what you can picture as one line.
- Movement in two dimensions is an infinite copy of one dimensional movement in a direction. So if you make multiple copies of your line let's say "upwards", then you end up with a solid square.
- Movement in three dimensions is an infinite amount of movement in two dimensions in a direction. Think of making an infinite "smear" of your square diagonally, so that you end up with a cube
- So movement in four dimensions is an infinite copy of movements from the first three. On paper, it's usually displayed as a "hypercube," the direction that the entire cube is moving being ananlogous to 'in' and 'out'
- So what this tells us about picturing a fourth dimension, is imagine that everything you see can be infinitely copied in a different direction, meaning that movement in a fourth dimension, would be movement of everything that's in your three dimensions, moving along another axis
Maybe this makes no sense, sorry for ramblin' on if it doesn't. Another way that usually helps me think of it, is in relation to how people refer to "time" as the fourth dimension. We measure different parts of the year as different positions that the Earth is, in reference to the sun. So "time" as a fourth dimension, relates to the position of the entire planet, moving on the "track" of our orbit. So if you plotted it out, it would be all three dimensions, moving on a different axis. Of course this isn't the most accurate definition, not only are we traveling compared to the Sun, but it's spinnin' around the galaxy, which is moving with the expanding universe, etc, etc
So I hope it doesn't sound like complte gibberish, it's always helped me with thinking in a fourth dimension, so I thought i'd take a stab at putting it down on post. -
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Re: Can you imagine...
Sun, December 21, 2003 - 10:06 AMRob,
Thanks for the explanation. It clarified something for me. I have always considered time non-linear which is different than what you have described. I do understand the mathmatics of giving time an axis in order to determine effects of velocity and mass etc. Something clicked and I see this as the best model for those of us who sometimes entertain the "what if I had made this choice instead of that choice..." game. We can't go back and change our choice without changing everything that happens after (put ourselves on a different trajectory), including who we are in this moment. My experience of time is non-linear - I know stuff and remember stuff that hasn't happened yet, I dream about interactions I have with people before I meet them etc. I have met others who describe similar experiences and I'm not talking about psychics. I am talking about being able to peer ahead and glimpsing future events, like looking at a map. I only get personal stuff, very local to me,what's on my personal map.
Thanks for the break down. It was not gibberish at all.
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