Wednesday, December 19, 2012

Pondering the 4th Spatial Dimension



This is a tesseract, an object from 4th dimensional space undergoing a simple rotation. The tesseract was developed from an idea that was derived from the following:
Imagine a one dimensional being viewing its world from a 1 dimensional perspective. The entirety of his universe would entail lengthy lines with no width and no lines visibly intersecting. In the 2nd dimension, an entity would perceive its world with objects that are flat but have length and height while being able to see all the vertices of the 1st dimension. Now moving to the 3rd dimension, our universe, all objects we perceive have length, height, width, and we can see all the vertices of the second dimension. Now when I say 'we can see all the vertices of the 2nd dimension', I am implying that in our 3D world, we view everything as if it were a 2D shape. When we view an object, we can only perceive the side facing us and nothing more. Imagine a floating sphere. The only way that we can identify that it is a sphere is due to the fact that light is reflecting off of it and creating a variation of hues on its surface. Now visualize that it is hovering way from you, you can sense that it is receding into the distance since it appears to be getting smaller. From here, think about the sphere moving away from you while growing in size at perfect equilibrium, preventing you from seeing that it is actually moving away as it grows. In other words, it appears to be at a stand still. This is because we can only detect 2 dimensions from our 3rd dimensional point of view. The same rules would apply for the 4th dimension. In this universe, all the vertices of a 3D object would be viewable, allowing a 4th dimensional being to see the entirety of anything in our universe. This implies that it would be able to see all around us and inside us at the same time. The example above provides some insight as to what a 4th dimensional object is comprised of but since we are in 3 dimensional space, we will never be able to fully comprehend a 4th dimensional view of an object. 

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