One interesting fact about 4D creatures is that they can see you, no matter how hard you try to hide in 3D space.
Distance still works! Think about Flatland - they can’t hide “behind” anything, but we still couldn’t see the people 20 miles away.
That is assuming that our universe is flat in the 4th dimension…
Well, yeah. Once you add another dimension the one below it becomes “flat.”
Not necessarily. A surface (e.g. a cylinder) isn’t ‘flat’ in our dimension, but is 2D
Sure, but Flatlanders still can’t hide behind anything in their environment. They’d be hidden by the very curvature of space, which is really the same as being too “far away” to be seen.
I’m not particularly bothered; this seems just semantics to me. Depends on if you view ‘hiding on the other side of the cylinder’ as being too far away to see. I don’t think it is, but if you feel differently that’s fine.
Well think about it from the Flatlander’s perspective! They can’t even perceive the cylindrical shape of their space. They wouldn’t be able to go behind the cylinder from their perspective, all they could do is go forward far enough that the shape of space hides them.
It’s not just semantics imo, cuz it would apply to us as well. If you’re ever confronted with a 4th dimensional being then the only way you can hide is to get far enough away. You can’t see the curvature of spacetime so that’s useless for you.
I think it would be possible to hide if you where given a map of where fourth dimensional curvature exists around you but you wouldn’t being able to observe anything different.
What if they close their eyes! Checkmate atheist.
Somehow it triggers my “be scared” response.
They can’t see you, the same way you can’t see a 2D object.
Wait, the mandelbrot set is two-dimensional.
This projection of the 4-dimensional being into 3D space appears as the Mandelbrot set. Weirdly, it appears to be the Mandelbrot set no matter what angle you look at it from in 3D space.
Alternatively it can just be any 3D shape depending on how thick the ‘slice’ of 4D space intersected by our 3D world is and wether the 4D thing is undergoing translation or rotation.
There is a four dimensional set of which the Mandelbrot set and Julia sets are both slices.
yeah but it looks fancy
Honestly it’s pretty funny to me how people think 4d is all strange and terrifying, when in fact it’s (to the degree that it can be said to actually exist, since it’s theoretical/mathematical) pretty “simple” and just headache inducing to try to wrap your head around.
like your mind wouldn’t shatter from being moved through 4d space, things would just look completely nonsensical and impossible, it’s no more lovecraftian than subatomic physics. It’s just Kronk saying “by all accounts, it doesn’t make sense”.
No, being rotated in the 4th dimension and plopped back down into the third dimension would be horrible and it wouldn’t surprise me if it killed you. For one, it would absolutely feel like a Lovecraftian nightmare. Your right arm is now your left. Your heart is in a different side of your chest. The “you” you see in the mirror will be the “you” you’ve seen in photographs. But look into chirality in chemistry. Your body would suddenly have tons of molecules that are a mirror image of what they should be and work with the mirror images of molecules they used to. Everything already in you would get flipped, but you might be on a ticking clock if you aren’t able to get the chiral opposites of necessary amino acids.
but you could get high as shit on a Vicks inhaler.
From your perspective, your body wouldn’t really change. It’s the handedness / chirality of the universe that would be flipped. It’s an odd thing to think about…
I debated on what it would be like before I posted and I think you’re right. It would be more like being “in the mirror” sort of. Everyone would look different to you and you’d look different from what people remember. You’d need to learn to read and write in reverse.
Well in that case you starve a slow death of malnutrition as your body is unable to properly process any of the food you eat, unless it’s also rotated 180 degrees along the 4th axis
You might enjoy this video on Darkseid. Higher dimensional fun!
If I were a 4d being for a day, I would rotate my enemies in 3d space until they’re exactly where they started but a mirrored version of themselves, so it appears to them as if I’ve mirrored their entire existence.
They would slowly die of malnutrition as the chiral molecules in their diet (such as glucose) would no longer meet the requirements of their body
It’s precisely rotation through the higher dimension that cannot be undone in the lower one. So… nice thought, I think?
“in 3d space” refers to the enemies, not the rotation. I should have been more clear
There’s a game on steam that lets you be in 4d space, but only a slice at a time. It’s super trippy to play
There’s 4d golf too by code parade.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2147950/4D_Golf/ https://youtube.com/@codeparade
That looks super trippy
Is that the one that works in VR? Apparently the effect works even better when you have stereo vision.
I was actually thinking of 4D Toys.
isn’t being in a slice of 4d space at a time just normal life?
I saw a video on higher dimensional geometry the other day and it said something at the end that gave me the following question: How do we know for sure that anything we perceive in our 3D world is actually only in 3D and not simply what we can perceive of higher dimensions?
A friend of mine is pretty sure Kenneth Copeland is a part of a fourth dimensional angler fish. He’s just out here looking vaguely human and teaching the Bible just wrong enough so that instead of Jesus coming back it’s going to be some nightmarish horror.
Also, he eats a pet every few days. Not because he needs meat, but because he feeds off the suffering of children.
Like an Aboleth or something. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_Advanced_Dungeons_%26_Dragons_2nd_edition_monsters&diffonly=true
Imagine one of those in a hidden dimension just sticking one of those tentacles in where we can see in a human skin suit.
In that case, yeah. Pretty much.
We don’t! When I was younger I had a theory that the brain is a 3D representation of an organ that exists in a higher dimension. Granted, I had (and still have) no relevant expertise to properly speculate on how that could work, but it was fun to think about.
If there are higher dimensions, say the extra seven asserted by String Theory, then we have breadth (thickness?) along each axis that is non zero. The higher-order string theory dimensions (which communicate particle information like gravity) are tightly rolled up.
Brian Greene uses the metaphore of an ant on a wire who can move along the wire freely, but can’t go far laterally. They may be so small that our quantum bits can’t drift anywhere, so our liver doesn’t abandon us drift along a high-level axis.
If there are flat higher level dimensions, then either a force or some kind of membrane would have to exist to keep our blood from leaking.
That said, when we have pure elements, or even pure minerals or chemicals, they retain the same density (mass to volume, sometimes affected by temperature) which suggests nothing is hiding away in other dimensions whenever we take measurements. If there is room along higher axes for unseen activity, it doesnt bug us enough to work out consistent properties.
We actually kinda do perceive a fourth dimension: time. Sure, we infer it from our memories and come up with cause and effect relationships to help us understand it. But we do know it’s there.
Okay, sure, but the question still remains, how do you know that there isn’t some 5th dimension for some random objects.
I think that’s one of the theories for explaining dark matter (i personally like the idea because it can also possibly address why gravity seems to be so much weaker of a fundamental force, but i’m a chemist, not a physicist, so take that with a grain of salt).
Because we see no evidence of a 4th spatial dimension. So if there is a fourth dimension, our universe doesn’t seem to have access to it.
Flatland: the meme
Great book! It’s in the public domain, you can grab yours here!
thanks my brain was itching for surreal posts fromt he nth dimension
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Little Bunny Foo Foo, I don’t wanna see you …
Well, that’s something I haven’t heard in a long, long time.
Fine. I’ll read Flatland again.
Would you not just be moved to a different time? Like the 4th dimension is time right? So you’d just be in another time period, in a different place.
That depends: In a certain way, we are already 4D creatures, with three spatial and one time dimension. However, in these contexts it‘s often useful to only refer to spatial dimensions. The 4D creature then has 4 spatial dimensions, and shares our time dimension.
But maybe its four spatial dimensions are our three spatial dimensions plus our time, and its time is something else completely? Then, by rotating you, it could place your head at a different time than your feet. But that also breaks causality and stuff.
No, Time is 1 dimension for us. It’s 1 temporal dimension, not the same as a spacial dimension. When you see someone say 3+1D or 3D+1D, that usually refers to 3 spacial dimensions, 1 temporal dimension.
No, time is not the same kind of dimension as space.
I think the thing here that confuses a lot of people is that we need to use movement over time to help our brains get some sort of grasp on how 4 spatial dimensions could work.
Think of it like how document scanners work: the scanner can only see a thin line, so to read the whole document it has to pass that line over the paper, which takes time.
On the other hand you have our eyes which can see a 2d plane, so we can see the entire paper at once, no time needed.So the time needed to scan the paper isn’t part of the paper’s 2-dimensionality, but it’s needed to represent it in 1 dimension.
In the same way we couldn’t directly perceive things in 4d, but we could rotate a 4d item through our 3d slice until we’ve seen all angles of it, and then try to build a mental approximation of how it actually looks.
A concrete example: to map a 3d sphere into 2d, you’d move it through the 2d plane which results in it looking like a circle that appears out of nowhere, grows until it reaches the widest part, then shrinks again until it dissapears.
Similarily, a 4d hypersphere passing through our 3d space would look like a sphere that appears out of nowhere, grows and shrinks, and then disappears again.That’s hard to wrap my head around lol, but thank you for the explanation
There are theories that suggest up to 11 spatial dimensions exist like some string theories.
Ten dimensions plus time in string theory.
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My head canon for the kids anime film Penguin Highway is that the plot is about a visitation by >3 dimensional beings. Adventures in flatland, but we’re living in flatland.
