Re: OT hypercube (was: Con-other)

On Sat, May 31, 2008 at 7:59 PM, Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...> wrote:

> On Sat, May 31, 2008 at 4:42 AM, Eugene Oh <un.doing@...> wrote:
> > I think the harder thing is not so much imagining the shape on a macro
> > scale, but trying to piece together in your brain how to map "edges" of
> > cubes to "faces" of tesseracts.
>
> Well, sure.  But it's more the other way around... a cube has squares
> connected by edges; a tesseract has cubes connected by squares. :)
>
> My sophomore year in college I had a roommate (another computer geek)
> who had written a basic program to display a projection of an
> N-dimensional cube for N up to 7 (the limit came from the BASIC
> language's limit on array subscripts).  You could turn perspective on
> or off, and rotate the figure arbitrarily in its space before the
> projection (hypercubes rotate around planes, instead of lines, and
> there are six such planar "axes").
>
Planar rotation goes even further off my radar. I can't even begin to
imagine it! I envy all you people who grasp mathematics so easily. :(


>
> > I've always been fascinated by talk of dimensions, at least since primary
> > school (when I was, say, 9) when my teacher offhandedly mentioned them.
>
> For me, and many of my peers, it was _A_Wrinkle_in_Time_, which
> involved "tessering" as a means of transportation.  With a completely
> unsatisfying explanation, math/physicswise, but it did get me hooked
> on the higher-dimension concept.
>
A Wrinkle in Time! I liked that book. Until I grew older and realised that
not only was the explanation unsatisfying, the descriptions of their
arriving on 2D planets completely unbelievable.

There is a process of pattern-repetition that has a name either very similar
or identical to "tesseract", but I can't remember what...


>
> > As I grew older I started getting skeptical about the
> > whole concept of dimensions, because, my reasoning went, no matter how
> small
> > you make a point, it still occupies volume.
>
> Well, modern physics believes that the universe has many higher
> physical dimensions; they're just very small.  That is, our 4-d
> spacetime is like a piece of paper in 3-d space - it's really
> 3-dimensional, but it seems 2-dimensional because it's so thin.
>
>
In 3D terms, that might be like... having a cube that was actually a
tesseract but no one realises it because from whichever angle human eyes can
only see a cube? Is that it?

Eugene

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