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Ever since reading Time-Life books in the library in the 70s I've wanted to visualize the 4th dimension. Has anyone actually achieved this? And if someone claim
by ralphc 5y ago
Ever since reading Time-Life books in the library in the 70s I've wanted to visualize the 4th dimension. Has anyone actually achieved this? And if someone claimed to, how would we verify it?
- layer8 5y agoYou can visualize 4D objects by visualizing morphing 3D objects (i.e. use time as the 4th dimension). Where it becomes tricky is 4D rotation, but I suspect that after a while you can get some limited intuition for it. Now I wonder whether it couldn’t also be visualized as the cross-product of two 2D worlds. We have two eyes with a 2D retina each, so maybe they could be trained for that. 4D obviously requires more representational space in our brain than 3D, and the per-eye visual processing apparatus would be limited to the respective pair of dimensions, so the internal visualization will probably have to be more coarse-grained or blurry in some way.
- goldenkey 5y agoIt's really not difficult if you just consider what a dimension really represents...a degree of freedom. So a 4th spatial dimension for us would be as if each point in our 3d space had a hole at the center of it. The 4th dimension is inside of every point. Lets say this 4th dimension is not infinite and is only 1 meter long. Then each of these holes would be 1 meter deep. The 4th dimension is just the result of replacing each point in 3d space with a line. If you start with a point, and you recursively replace all points (not just endpoints), with perpendicular lines (no overlap with existing points), you'll have a simple process that constructs higher and higher dimensions. It's possible that gravity originates from a 4th spatial dimension and thus appears to be radiating outward isotropicly from the center of all matter.