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See 4-D Space With 3-D Glasses

purpleant writes: "A hyperplane is a 3-dimensional space that slices through the 4-dimensional space, the same way a 2-dimensional plane can slice through our 3-dimensional space. The bounding hyperplanes can be extended infinitely so that they criss-cross through each other, chopping up hyperspace into many 4-dimensional 'chunks.' Again the inner chunks are finite, and they are distributed in shells around the core polytope. The HyperStar applet displays those finite chunks, one shell at a time. The inner shells are complete -- each shell completely encases the previous shell. The outermost shells have holes in them."

19 of 214 comments (clear)

  1. hold up... by circletimessquare · · Score: 5, Funny

    so it's 5 am monday morning on the east coast and i decide to check out slashdot before going to bed for 4 hours of shuteye before work tomorrow (don't ask, crazy weekend). i am bleary eyed, brain dead, exhausted.

    and i read "The bounding hyperplanes can be extended infinitely so that they criss-cross through each other, chopping up hyperspace into many 4-dimensional 'chunks.' Again the inner chunks are finite, and they are distributed in shells around the core polytope."

    dudes! my functional iq right now is about 50! if you are going to post these kind of stories on slashdot, could you PLEASE post them around, say 3pm on a thursday? thanks ;-P

    i should be awake by then, and i promise i will come back and try to wrap my mind around this story at that time... grumble, grumble

    --
    intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
    1. Re:hold up... by Elbereth · · Score: 3, Informative

      That's nothing. I just took two Benedryl. I think I'll go to sleep now.

  2. It's quite simple.... by Jeffv323 · · Score: 3, Funny

    Step 1: Make cool applet with shapes and colors.
    Step 2: Explain shapes and colors with big words and things nobody knows anything about ie: hyperplanes, polytopes, and the fourth dimension
    Step 3: .....
    Step 4: Profit!!

    --
    I'm a minister!
  3. Aaahhh, now I see by RenHoek · · Score: 3, Funny

    It's one of those OpenGL Windows 95 screensavers! :) Why didn't you just say so?

    1. Re:Aaahhh, now I see by DjMd · · Score: 3, Funny

      Really?

      The BSOD (Blue screen of death) is the 5th Dimension?
      Cool. Bill Gates is Buckaroo Banzai!




      Oh come on you are just jealous that you didn't make the Buckaroo Banzai reference!

      --
      DJMD - The fourth man - Planetary
  4. You don't need 3-D glasses... by AaronBaker2000 · · Score: 5, Informative

    If you set the Stereo mode to "Cross-eyed," you can view the picture in 3-D using the Magic Eye technique.

    1. Re:You don't need 3-D glasses... by flonker · · Score: 5, Funny

      Simple solution. Stick a crayon in your left eye. That'll fix things real good.

  5. Re:Holy crap! by NanoGator · · Score: 3, Funny

    You realize, though, that real life girls are 4-dimensional. 5 if you count their emotional state.

    --
    "Derp de derp."
  6. Re:Purdy... by AaronBaker2000 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    ... too bad I don't really have a clue what it means. *sigh* I guess this is why I'm not majoring in Math ;-)


    You should read Flatland. It's a fun beginners guide to other deminsions. It's a great story too.

  7. Hypercube by imevil · · Score: 3, Informative

    Here

    Less pretty but more understandable

  8. Edwin Abott would've loved it by SpatialJ · · Score: 3, Informative
    It's a pity E. Abott, author of "Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions" has died some 80 years ago. Maybe he even would have sold the film-rights of his n-dimensional love story "soon showing in java-applet near you".

    BTW: things like the famous Stereoscopic Animated Hypercube have been around for quite some while. There even is a game around to be played.

  9. It is difficult, but... by tanveer1979 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    the thing about opening our minds is right.
    We have always lived in three dimensions, so visualizing 4 dimensions Per Se is almost impossible coz our nuerons have been hardwired for 3 dimensions. So we can observe 4 dimensions in transit. For example if youwere a 2 dimensional being(thats not possible coz 3 is the minumum number of dimensions to sustain life) and a 3D sphere passed through your space, you will see a point, growing into a circle and then again into a point.
    So if a 4D object came it would look like a morphing 3D object.
    If mankind were able to create and use 4D's travel would be a whole new frontier. Esp since space-time is curved, Just imagine traveling a million miles instantaniosly
    Confused! Go through stephen hawkings works! you will be even more so :-)

    --
    My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
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    1. Re:It is difficult, but... by psych031337 · · Score: 3, Insightful
      We have always lived in three dimensions, so visualizing 4 dimensions Per Se is almost impossible coz our nuerons have been hardwired for 3 dimensions.


      Breaking up these limitations is not as hard as it might seem. The traditional length X width X depth is just an example of a 3d room. I understood multi-dimensionality with this simple analogy:

      Imagine the "room of cookies"

      1st dim: color (red, green, blue,...)
      2nd dim: shape (round, square, triangular,...)
      3rd dim: consistency (very hard, hard, soft,...)
      4th dim: size (from very small to very large)

      There you have it. A 4dim room that can be used to express any kind of cookie in a mathematical vector. For adding more dimensions all you have to make sure is that the new dimension os orthogonal, which means that the new component/unit has to be linear independent of all the other components/unit (which could for instance be the 5th dimension of texture (like smooth, rugged, etc.)

      (Not an native english speaker, so please excuse me for using incorrect/half correct words.)
      --
      +++ath0
  10. This was an old college argument... by Thalia · · Score: 5, Insightful

    We used to argue this in the computer science lab at college. Can the human mind gain visualization skills in four dimensional geometry? We came up with the following interesting answers:

    1. It's hard. We never see four diminsions. The brain would keep wanting to make one dimension some known continuim such as time, a color sequence, tone, or intensity. Only after this intermediate step would you get a true four dimensional geometry in your head.

    2. You would need to have a true 3D display. Current rendering of three dimensional pictures flattened onto simple two dimensional screens would never work. Imagine using a laser pointer as a point source, and imagine that you had never seen a three dimensional object; now draw a three dimensional picture of a pick-up truck using the laser pointer. At the time, we were trying to get a simple three dimensional output, like <a href="http://www.stereographics.com/frames/frame-p rod.html">Crystal Eyes</a>. Now there are liquid crystal on silicon solutions that are much cleaner, if not cheaper.

    We were students once, and poor.

  11. I have a large collection of 4D media by guttentag · · Score: 5, Funny
    Each one takes a 3D image and progresses along a fourth dimensional plane I like to call:

    <fingerquotes>TIME<fingerquotes>
    This combination is stored in a media format I call a:
    <fingerquotes>MO-VIE<fingerquotes>
    4D is very subjective, so long as you are allowed to define the four dimensions involved.
  12. Re:Reminds me of a story... by invid · · Score: 3, Interesting

    According to the Theory of Relativity, mass curves space. The question is, in what direction is it curved? In the direction of a higher physical, non-time producing dimension, perhaps? You've seen all those pictures that show a representation of a black hole curving a two-dimensional space to a singularity. You've heard the theories about wormholes providing short-cuts through the universe. These theories take it for granted that our space is curved within a higher physical dimension. Instead of being the 4th dimension, time could be the 5th dimension.

    --
    The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
  13. Extrapolation for 4d/5d sound by metlin · · Score: 3, Interesting

    There was something similar done by a guy called Luke Dahl, only it was for audio.

    It was a Markhov chain extrapolation of the 3d sound as perceived by a 3d being and using a series of normalizations and transforms.

    It was called Frobenius Norm, and was a composition of how a 4-d sound would sound to a 5-d being, I think. I just remember it being "spiffy" and very addictive! :-)

    It was also featured in Woodstockhausen 2000.

  14. Re:Reminds me of a story... by JohnsonJohnson · · Score: 5, Informative

    No.

    That's not a question in general relativity. The curvature of a spacetime can be measured without considering it as being embedded in manifold of higher dimension. How? Here is the common demonstration of the idea without using the language of math which makes the idea harder to convey. If you want a more rigourous explanation see here. Note that the curvature we are concerned with here is the Gaussian curvature which is intrinsic, ie it can be measured without considering directions outside of the dimension of interest.

    Consider the surface of sphere, any ball is a reasonable approximation. Now consider the following path. Starting at the equator while facing west (these are all well defined directions if you use the right hand rule and call north the direction of your thumb then east follows the curvature of your fingers and west is opposite east). Now go 1/4 of the circumference of the circle west, turn to face north. This is a 90 degree turn. Go to the north pole. Now turn 90 degrees again (again this is a well defined operation, when facing any direction a 90 degree turn is accomplished by orienting yourself such that the direction previously over your right shoulder is now the direction you are facing). Now continue to the equator. You should be at the original starting point, and another 90 degree turn will leave you facing west, your original direction of departure.

    So you've traced out a triangle: a closed path with three vertices, but you've made 3 90 degree turns so the sum of the interior angles is greater than 180 degrees in violation of euclidean geometry. Therefore you know your 2 dimensional world: which is the surface of the sphere, is curved. Note that is is not necessary for this surface to actually be curved "into" anything. If the sphere is the spacetime of a universe then there is by definition nothing outside of the surface of the sphere to consider, all of space and all of time are contained on the surface. The surface is still curved, but it doesn't "curve" into anything, that's just a property of the spacetime.

    I'm not sure I can make it any clearer, but if you consider Occam's razor you'll see that it doesn't make sense to thing about curved spacetimes as being embedded in some higher dimension. Since it is possible to measure curvature without appealing to a higher dimension (remember we never left the surface of the sphere in the above example) then you don't need the higher dimension, all the information required is contained in your local spacetime.

  15. Tic tac toe by tuxedo-steve · · Score: 4, Interesting
    A fun four-dimensional exercise is 4d tic-tac-toe. It's easiest if you build yourself up to it:
    1. Start with your typical 3x3 tic-tac-toe, on a piece of paper.
    2. Now add two more grids. Visualise each grid on top of the one before. It's not difficult to see how this is played. You can get three in a row on a single grid, just like normal. Or you can get three in a row by getting the middle square of each grid (3 in a row, vertically). And so on. This is basically tic-tac-toe in 3D. 3 sets of 3x3 grids. 3x3x3.
    3. Now, add another two sets of three grids. So now you've got 3x3 3x3 grids (still with me?). You can still win just like in the 3x3x3 version. But you've got another 3x3 ways in which to do it. The tricky part is, to visualise each possible `3 in a row', you've got to mentally `rotate in' any one (and only one) 3x3x3 cubic plane.
    Sorry if that's difficult to follow. If you work it through on paper, you'll see what I mean. This is what being bored in math class will lead you to think of, when plain old tic-tac-toe just doesn't seem challenging anymore. :)
    --
    - SMJ - (It's not just a name: it's a bad aftertaste.)