[unreality]

Have you heard some 'theories' about there being "beings of a greater dimension than us looking down on us"...

this is BS, IMO ;D Think about it - are we like 3-dimensional deities/superbeings to a 2-dimensional Flatland world? I don't think so! Just curious about your thoughts on this

[Guest]

Yeah, the book Flatland does give a good perspective on this. We are 3-dimensional, though we live in the 4th dimension. I couldn't possibly imagine what something in the 5th, 12th, 31st, or even higher dimensions would be like.

[Joe's Student]

Have you heard some 'theories' about there being "beings of a greater dimension than us looking down on us"...

this is BS, IMO ;D Think about it - are we like 3-dimensional deities/superbeings to a 2-dimensional Flatland world? I don't think so! Just curious about your thoughts on this

If you're talking about a 4D 'superbeing' towering over us 3D squawks... then yea I've thought about it too. Not believing there to be such a thing though, and even if there was, it wouldn't be anywhere near as simplistic as that.

But I've always thought about the poor 2D stickman lol, if he was a conscious entity it would literally blow his mind the thought of us 3D entities same way we have difficulty getting are heads round the n dimensions out there, sure the math holds up, but getting it into our heads and accepting even a 4th dimension is extremely difficult.

[Izzy]

Yeah, I've heard about this.

If the 4th, 5th, 6th, etc. dimensions actually exist, in forms other than space or time, I can see how this is plausible. It doesn't even fully make sense to me, but basically, we live in the 3rd dimension and can only see if 3 dimensions or less. For all we know, 4-d things can be all around us, but we can't see them, only the bits of them that penetrate into our dimension.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but that's what an hour of YouTubing a while back taught me.

[unreality]

Frost and JS: That's what I mean - I'm saying that just because there may be higher dimensions (possible) doesn't mean that there are beings of a "higher dimension looking down on us", mainly because we aren't looking down on some 2d world.

If there ARE 31 dimensions to space, we are 31st dimensional beings

Edited September 30, 2008 by unreality

[Joe's Student]

Yeah, the book Flatland does give a good perspective on this. We are 3-dimensional, though we live in the 4th dimension. I couldn't possibly imagine what something in the 5th, 12th, 31st, or even higher dimensions would be like.

Exactly what I mean, it's pretty much impossible to get your head around.

[Brandonb]

Have you heard some 'theories' about there being "beings of a greater dimension than us looking down on us"...

this is BS, IMO ;D Think about it - are we like 3-dimensional deities/superbeings to a 2-dimensional Flatland world? I don't think so! Just curious about your thoughts on this

OK I just spent 10 mins trying to find something, I can't find what I was looking for to disprove your statement... but I do have two words that will disprove it nonetheless... Homer Cubed

EDIT: I GOT IT!

http://www.videosinhd.com/mega.html?file=OQTFBHXK

14:30 into the video... check it out.

Edited September 30, 2008 by Brandonb

[Guest]

The 4th dimension is usually recognized as time.

[Izzy]

Does that mean time is an entity that has a form that we're incapable of seeing?

[Guest]

Does that mean time is an entity that has a form that we're incapable of seeing?

No, we live in the 4th dimension.

[Izzy]

No, we live in the 4th dimension.

But we can't see 4 dimensional entities.

[Joe's Student]

Does that mean time is an entity that has a form that we're incapable of seeing?

That's what I mean about the concept being a hard one to intake, even if the proof is there. Because unlike the lower dimensions Time doesn't take a shape, and is therefore a difficult thing to understand...

[Guest]

But we can't see 4 dimensional entities.

We are 4th dimensional beings, if you regard the 4th dimension as time. If you regard it as spatial, then we aren't, and we don't live in 4 dimensions. Though there are things that have 4 spatial dimensions.

[Joe's Student]

But we can't see 4 dimensional entities.

Time doesn't act as an 'entity' as such.

God i wish i wasn't only at AS level physics still.. *waits patiently for experienced physycist to come along and explain properly to me and whoever else is interested enough, the ins and outs of it*

BTW, AS level is a set of exams i do for 17 year olds, and because the education departments at home are rubbish the physics that is taught is dumbed down and cut short <_< <_<

[Prof. Templeton]

an interesting video on the ten dimensions. No beings though.

[Izzy]

Sorry if this is a bit off topic, but it reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend a while back.

How do we know Time is even there? I mean, we can't prove it's there with any of our senses. Simply knowing Time is there proves nothing. Is Time just something someone a long time ago made up, or is it, like actually there?

[unreality]

epic

On Topic: aside from theoretical hyperspace shapes (tesseracts, hyperspheres, etc), I think it's not a well-backed statement to say that if there's higher dimensions, there are "higher dimensional beings" looking down on us. If that was so, why aren't we the overlookers of a 2d world? If this universe had 31 dimensions, we would be 31st dimensional beings (3 of space, 1 of time, 29 quantum dimensions or something lol) since we are part of the universe

Edited September 30, 2008 by unreality

[Joe's Student]

an interesting video on the ten dimensions. No beings though.

Thanks found that interesting and was helpful

[unreality]

Watched the video, interesting...

[Guest]

epic

Yeah, I saw that on wikipedia, it's awesome.

[Guest]

This is an interesting idea, but I see a flaw in the comparison. In that we live in a 4-dimensional world, with 3 space dimensions and 1 time dimension, are there any truly 2-dimensional worlds that our world encompasses? Even a sheet of paper is actually 3-dimensional; even the drawings we make on a sheet of paper have nonzero thickness. I argue that the fact that we cannot see any 2-dimensional beings is a result of the absence of any truly 2-dimensional worlds in our current observational capacity.

[Guest]

But I've always thought about the poor 2D stickman lol, if he was a conscious entity it would literally blow his mind the thought of us 3D entities

"You mean you people don't have to climb over the top of each other? You can walk around each other? Whoa..."

I think Azure_Knight's hit the nail on the head there. However many dimensions there are in our universe, that's how many there are. Sometimes people talk about "other dimensions" as being some other place, I think they are just getting confused. If there are more than four dimensions, and they were large enough to move around*, we could all move around them.

* That condition's quite an important one. String theorists reckon there's about 10, 11 or 26 dimensions. How come we didn't notice? Well apparently the spare dimensions might be compactified, that is, they are circular, wrap-around dimensions (like in pac-man, walk off one side of the board and you appear on the other side), and they are too small for us to notice. If you think of an ant crawling along a wire, there are effectively two dimensions to where it can go; one along the wire and another "wrapped" dimension around it. But from the point of view of a larger being the wire seems to have only one dimension (length) and position around the wire seems less relevant. So we might all be moving around in 26 dimensions but unless you look on a subatomic level you'd never notice.

[unreality]

What Azure_Knight and Octopuppy is basically the point I've been trying to make My argument is that there is no 2d world, and there is no 5d world. We live in the universe, and so that's what it is. Even a sheet of paper is millions of molecules thick, as AK said.

Thus my assertion that, not just because we aren't the overseers of a 2d world, there are no 'hyperbeing' overseers of OUR world ;D

[Guest]

hmm all this stuff about 31 dimensions i dont feel like getting my head around......

i always thought we lived in 3D. i dont really agree with "time" being the 4th D, sounds a bit iffy if you ask me.

edit: and if there are 31 or whatever dimensions what if there not in our part of space. so we're just 3D but some cool aliens are, i dunno, 75D or something.

anyway heres something interesting that my brother once made me think about......

anyway imagine if there was a 2D world and something cylindrical (ie 3D) from our world came and made a hole in the 2D world. Then all the people in the 2D world would just see a circular hole left by the cylinder. So if something "4D" made a hole in our world, we 3D people would think it was a 3D cylinder shaped hole, but the 4D people might have some really cool shape instead. anyway, thats my two cents. i'll get back to reading.

Edited October 1, 2008 by lemonymelon

[unreality]

Yeah, we only see cross-sections.

Vision of Beings, Regardless of Depth Perception:

1d beings see a dot in front of them (0d)

2d beings see a 1d line in front of them (1d)

3d beings see a 2d plane in front of them (2d)

4-dimensional beings (if you say time=4d, then I mean 5d here) would SEE in three dimensions. While we, as 3d beings, see a plane in front of us (with depth perception to distinguish 3d objects, though basically we see 2d and our brain does the rest), 4d beings would see every 3d side of something, and then their brains would put together a 4d image from the 3d

[Guest]

anyway heres something interesting that my brother once made me think about......

anyway imagine if there was a 2D world and something cylindrical (ie 3D) from our world came and made a hole in the 2D world. Then all the people in the 2D world would just see a circular hole left by the cylinder. So if something "4D" made a hole in our world, we 3D people would think it was a 3D cylinder shaped hole, but the 4D people might have some really cool shape instead. anyway, thats my two cents. i'll get back to reading.

In order for the 2D people to experience that, they would be existing in a 2D subset of a 3D world. The 3D people probably wouldn't even be able to see that plane world, they would just walk straight through it. But the 2D people might perhaps see the effects of that, as cross-sections of objects appearing and disappearing as they passed through. So to them there might be 2 types of matter: truly 2D matter, and cross-sections of 3D matter (if the former didn't exist, we would simply be talking about a plane subset of the 3D world with no particular properties of its own, so it would be pretty bizarre for complex 2 dimensional effects to exist in that plane and have an awareness limited to the plane, for no particular reason).

The same goes for higher dimensional objects intersecting with our world. Maybe they can do but never have done. Perhaps a big higher dimensional cylinder is headed this way and any minute now - BAM! We all suddenly cease to exist as a huge sphere pops out of nowhere encompassing the whole milky way. Probably not though, if that sort of thing happened it would be a regular occurrence. I hope.

To get an idea of what a 4D object would look like intersecting with 3D space, take a look in the mirror. A human being is a long 4 dimensional worm-like thing, tapered at the past end (people are smaller in the early part of their lives), roughly aligned with the time dimension but wiggling and curled around other worms (we call that movement). What you see is a cross section of the worm: a human being at one moment in time.