I forget where I heard this but someone mentioned that a 4-dimensional being could mirror you. Doesn't sound so bad until you realize your amino acids & stuff would all be the opposite chirality, which means you could no longer process food.
this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2024
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This, the mirroring part, also happens in an Arthur C. Clarke short story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_Error
Mass Effect has a similar idea. There are species that eat levo foods and ones that eat dextro foods.
Heh, eating isn't the only time they have to worry about protein absorption.
demand they mirror your food too
There's a great YA book about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boy_Who_Reversed_Himself?wprov=sfla1
He spins you around for fun, and puts you back when he's done, but off by a hundredth of a degree. Depending on how strict your interpretation is, you either no longer exist in the same 3D universe except at that single point of intersection, or you will drift off from it the further you move from your current location.
This is a comic adaptation of the 1884 (that's not a typo) Flatland, but in the book, instead of rotating, they explain the concept of the next higher dimension. Similar result. Good book, nails the social satire of sexism (remains relevant today).
Fun fact, the Mandelbrot set is a 2-dimensional set (because it's defined in the complex plane). However, its boundary line is a fractal, which can be understood as having a non-integer dimension (i.e., between 1, the topological dimension of a line, and 2, the dimension of a plane). There are multiple ways to define fractal dimensions such as the Hausdorff dimension. For example, the Sierpinski triangle has a Hausdorff dimension of 1.58. But the Mandelbrot set is special here, too, as it seems to have a Hausdorff dimension of 2, meaning that its boundary is so curly that it fills "a plane's worth of space" despite its line-like topology.
Silly, the Mandelbrot set is just 2D. Payback's a bitch, motherfucker.
You know the weirdest shit about fractals is that if the fractal is space filling (you repeated the pattern at all scales for infinity and end up filling a 2d area with lines somehow than that fractal exists between the integers definitions of dimensions). A 1d simple line fractal pattern can through the bullshit magic of math have a dimensionality of 1.65 or whatever, it is weird shit.
I am sure I got something wayyyy wrong about this lol, but whatever.
Eh, there's probably worse ways to go insane.
Theese captchas
..isn't the 4th dimension just time?
Time is a 4th dimension when talking about spacetime, which assumes three dimensions of space and one dimension of progressing time.
In geometry, a 4-dimensional object can be projected as a 3-dimensional shadow.
Time is a 4th dimension when talking about spacetime, which assumes three dimensions of space and one dimension of progressing time.
Yeah, that's basically what I was referring to. Everything I know about dimensions, I learned from Doctor Who, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Donnie Darko!
stabs pencil through folded paper to illustrate wormhole
FWIW our current understanding of spacetime includes multi-dimensional time, which is why we experience more or less time when we are traveling at high speed or experiencing strong gravitational fields. It's sort of like moving diagonally across a room, except entirely different.
That is not how time dilation works.
I know, that's why I said it's entirely different.
But also, we don't know exactly how time dilation works. We know it does, because it makes sense mathematically and we have experienced it in applications, but we don't really know how it works.
Probably just taking about the 4th spacial dimension
I like to work from the assumption that there's nothing magic about the three dimensions we live in aside from the fact that it's how it is, so any higher dimensions would work just like the three we already have, which are identical to each other just in different directions.