Re: OT: 4D

On Thu, Feb 24, 2005 at 03:36:08PM -0500, # 1 wrote:
> Concerning that topic, what I'm curious to hear about is their language but
> not only this
>
> I particularily hope to see their writing, because here, in a 3D world, the
> writing are written on the surfaces in 2D
>
> But their "sufaces" are in 3D, so they would have a "3D-writing" I hope
> you'll try to create one!
[...]

That's a good point. 4D writing would be curves (or surfaces) in a 3D
brane. Unfortunately this may be difficult to display, because you
could have glyphs that are like the letter O, except that in 3D,
that's a hollow sphere, which from our 3D viewpoint looks identical to
a solid sphere or a sphere containing other penstrokes inside it
(which we can't see unless the lettershape was transparent), say like
the 3D analog of the Greek theta. To a 4D person, these are distinct
letters, but us poor 3D beings would only see the same spherical
surface.

Having 3D surfaces for "paper" also has other interesting
implications, such as how you'd wrap lines of text. Not only could you
go left-to-right or right-to-left, but after you fill out a 2D area,
you can still wrap downwards into the 3rd dimension and fill out
several more layers of 2D areas before you use up the space on the
page. There's also no reason to restrict yourself to this layout. You
could write in concentric cylindrical shells, for example, and spiral
outwards from the center or inwards from the outer edges of the page
like a rolled-up scroll, except that you don't need to unroll it to
read it. :-)


T

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