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how can someone visualise fourth, or higher dimensions? (kbin.social)

submitted 1 year ago by Narrrz@kbin.social to c/NoStupidQuestions@kbin.social

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can our brains actually learn to comprehend, to envision dimensions beyond the perceptible three? how could you describe higher dimensional shapes in a way that would allow someone to visualise them?

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[–] dmention7@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

The way that works best for me is to use time as the extra dimension. Each moment you observe is a 3d "slice" of the universe as you move forward in time at a fixed rate.

To analogize, imagine a circle that lives in an XY plane, moving around in this plane as the plane itself glides along in the Z axis. You'd see some weird snakelike structure growing off towards the sky, but the circle only ever experiences it's movement in the XY plane. It surely remembers where it was before and has some idea where it will be in 5 minutes, but you can see every point of it's existence in 3D space all at once. Likewise a 4d being could in principle see your entire timeline at a glance.

This has some weird Lovecraftian implications though if you imagine what that 2d circle would see if it a 3d sphere happened to cross through its plane, and then extrapolate that to the 3d world... The exercise is left to the reader 😉

[–] Narrrz@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

I was doing something similar; for one dimension, I imagine a sequence of dots. the 2nd dimension adds a series of new lines of dots, forming a flat sheet, the the third dimension adds new rows of these sheets.

for the fourth dimension, you regress back to the first; now all dimensions before are encapsulated within each dot.

however, in the past I came across a website which allowed you to manipulate a hypercube, rotating it through our familiar dimensions as well as the third it extends into. I found myself utterly unable to predict how rotating the two dimensional image of a 3d representation of a 4d object would alter what was displayed.

ever since then I've been curious to learn to envision what such an object would "look" like. these ways of thinking about higher dimensions don't really shed any light on that.