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What Is a Manifold?

bastian.rieck.me

51–60 of 115 posts

Re: What Is a Manifold?

#51

If anyone has questions (especially technical ones), the ##math channel on freenode is pretty phenomenal. It's quite active, with quite a few grad students, across a range of fields. The best part is how friendly and helpful they are to learners. Anyway, highly recommended.

this in general accurate but I would warn people to have a thick skin in there because there are some seriously toxic people in there (TRW3W or whatever his/her name that was fairly knowledgeable but hung out in there I think purely to assert his/her superiority).

This is good advice for existing at all in the world. They're not toxic except in high doses, like all sorts of people.

Re: What Is a Manifold?

#52

"Quick" etymological fact about what mathematicians in English call Manifolds: If one would translate Riemann's original German word for them, "Mannigfaltigkeit", it would translate to "manifoldyhead", or, more understandable to the speaker of Modern English: Manyfoldyhood. (Think of -head as in "Godhead", not as in "Brotherhood", in the same sense that the "ring" in "algebraic ring" refers to "ring" in the sense of…

i'm sorry i don't quite follow (even though i'm pretty keen on etymology in general and etymological origins of mathematical objects in particular). you say that >Think of -head as in "Godhead", not as in "Brotherhood" and >Translating "Mannigfaltigkeit" as "Manifoldness" seems equal to mistranslating "Geheimnis" as "Secrethood" and "Geheimheit" as "Secretness", but https://www.etymonline.com/word/-head#etymonline_v_…

>indicates to me that -ness is exactly the correct translation of Mannigfaltigkeit, since in the instance of godhead a accurate synonym would be godliness (and in the instance maidenhead maybe maidenly).

Strictly speaking, if one entertains the distinction involved here, "Godhead", as a noun, serves as a hypernym to "God" and "Goddess"; and "Godheads" as a hypernym to "Gods" and "Goddesses", which neither "godness", "godessness", "godliness" nor "godessliness" do. This makes sense, as "Heit" used to function (and in some very rare German dialects supposedly still does) as a separate noun, unlike "-nis" and "-ness". Does that help make the distinction between the two suffixes clearer?

(Note: You left open the matter of -ig and -y.)

>would be to simply describe a space as manifold rather than a manifold

Correct, you got that right, however, I think that talking about spaces in this way doesn't so much serve as a substitutive translation but as a consequence of the distinction involved - coming hand in hand, basically.

Re: What Is a Manifold?

#53
What a great read! I've never thought about how the way we experience the surface of the earth as 2D manifold of a 3D space, and how up until recently (relatively speaking) this was unknown.

It's interesting to expand on this idea and realize that maybe we are making the same mistake again, and that from our local perspective the universe is 3D, when in reality, it's a 3D manifold of a higher dimensional space.

One thing I am still unclear of though, is that isn't this proven to be the case? Is it not true that we are provably living in at least a 4D space, where time is the fourth dimension? We can observe its existence but cannot move freely through it and are confined to free transformations only in 3D space? In this way, aren't we living in a 3D manifold in a 4D space? So maybe then the question is are we living in a 3D manifold of a +4D space?

Re: What Is a Manifold?

#55

It's funny, because in my much younger days I dropped out of college and worked as a mechanic for 3 years. In the automotive world and internal combustion World, manifold has a much different meaning, though related. Basically, a manifold means something that takes the flow of gases from a one-to-many or a many-to-one. An intake manifold takes one single entry point for air feeding the engine and splits up into a sep…

And I always think of the mathematical definition. It's nice to see the mechanical terminology explained. Thanks!

Re: What Is a Manifold?

#56
post #12

All is well until the poor bug finds out it's on a Klein Bottle, or worse yet RP2. Is there any way to distinguish between orientable or nonorientable surfaces when you're simply walking on it? If the bug was also 2d, I might have had some ideas hut I'm totally blanking for 3d.

> Is there any way to distinguish between orientable or nonorientable surfaces when you're simply walking on it? Draw a circle on the surface and orient it. If the surface is non-orientable then there's a way to take a long walk, return to the circle, and find that the direction of the orientation has changed.

This depends upon the circle you chose. Nonorientable manifolds still have many orientable circles (any sufficiently small loop is orientable).

Re: What Is a Manifold?

#57

It's funny, because in my much younger days I dropped out of college and worked as a mechanic for 3 years. In the automotive world and internal combustion World, manifold has a much different meaning, though related. Basically, a manifold means something that takes the flow of gases from a one-to-many or a many-to-one. An intake manifold takes one single entry point for air feeding the engine and splits up into a sep…

Sorry, I was not aware of that! It was not my intention to mislead you. Hope you enjoyed the article nonetheless :-)

Plenum is also used to describe automotive intakes, and has a physics meaning as well.

Re: What Is a Manifold?

#58

It's funny, because in my much younger days I dropped out of college and worked as a mechanic for 3 years. In the automotive world and internal combustion World, manifold has a much different meaning, though related. Basically, a manifold means something that takes the flow of gases from a one-to-many or a many-to-one. An intake manifold takes one single entry point for air feeding the engine and splits up into a sep…

Isn't this like a multiplexer/demultiplexer in electronics/signal processing?

Re: What Is a Manifold?

#59
post #53

What a great read! I've never thought about how the way we experience the surface of the earth as 2D manifold of a 3D space, and how up until recently (relatively speaking) this was unknown. It's interesting to expand on this idea and realize that maybe we are making the same mistake again, and that from our local perspective the universe is 3D, when in reality, it's a 3D manifold of a higher dimensional space. One t…

Sort of, not quite.

The basic background is that Einstein wrote a paper taking Lorentz more seriously than Lorentz took his own work: and that paper suggested that just maybe, when you accelerate in any given direction by an acceleration A, you see all of the clocks ahead of you some distance z tick faster by a factor A z / c², where c is the speed of light in vacuum, and behind you they tick slower with the corresponding negative z until a wall of death at z = -c² / A where clocks do not tick at all and time appears to stand still. This is in fact the only new fact that special relativity adds. Lots of people got very confused about the philosophical implications, but the mathematical implication is that time and space can be mixed together by these accelerations and must be treated as one unified geometrical entity.

Einstein then went one further on the whole 4D thing, because arguably we are always accelerating in this whole gravitational field of the Earth. You have a lot of options to choose from. So this part took Einstein many many years to work out. Maybe the easiest is to say that we standing on Earth are a non-accelerating reference frame, and then anybody who falls must see a wall of death somewhere out in space. That turns out to be a very boring approach, and also wrong. What Einstein suggested instead was that you are in a non-accelerating reference frame with no wall of death if you are in free-fall, and we standing on the Earth would see a wall of death beneath our feet, except we can't see beneath our feet. But if a body were more massive, maybe we could see the wall of death from orbit. And now we have a photo of a black hole to prove it! But even before that, the essential point is that if I put a clock up somewhere high (on a tower, in a plane, or at the top of a mountain) and I am standing on the ground, then I am accelerating towards that clock relative to free-fall: so that clock must be ticking faster than my clocks are. And we have had direct observation of that “gravitational time dilation” for a long time.

Mathematically, this means that we are in a manifold that looks locally 4 dimensional, in this weird way of coupling the four dimensions that couples accelerations with the ticking of clocks. We say, going back to this guy who worked out all of the mathematics before Einstein, that the manifold is locally Lorentzian, as opposed to Euclidean. But the manifold is four dimensional, not three dimensional. It has to have this coupling between time and space locally. But then globally it can have these interesting features like black holes.

Now, whether we can embed this curvy universe that we inhabit into a larger dimensional flat space, is not necessarily a given. I don't know many physicists who are deeply interested in that sort of question. Certainly to have the structure that we need, it needs to have Lorentzian timelike dimensions in it, one of which we use as our time dimension. Certainly also, the people working on string theory use these extra-dimensional possibilities to solve certain mathematical inadequacies that their string theories otherwise have: but usually those dimensions are locally available, so we would see them; so there is some sort of hand-waving about how they must be curled up into such a small length scale that we cannot actually observe them. But there is certainly a branch of string theory called M-theory that I do not personally know too much about which has something to do with viewing our universe as a geometric entity in a larger space.

Thankfully, the mathematics does not require this. The essential point of a manifold that the article somehow leaves out, is that I am no longer going to rely on global coordinates. I only care about local coordinates. So on the sphere, it is a two dimensional object, even though it lives in a three dimensional space, and that's because depending on where I am, I can uniquely identify points near me on the sphere by either their x & y coordinates, or their y & z coordinates, or their x & z coordinates. This fails for points that are not nearby me, because projecting a globe on to a flat surface this way will project two hemispheres onto the same point. But I can always choose one of those three and find myself in the middle of a hemisphere, and describe everything else on that hemisphere with those coordinates. So the whole point of a manifold is that I don't need global coordinates, and therefore it doesn't matter much whether or not I am embedded in a larger flat space or not.

Re: What Is a Manifold?

#60
post #53

What a great read! I've never thought about how the way we experience the surface of the earth as 2D manifold of a 3D space, and how up until recently (relatively speaking) this was unknown. It's interesting to expand on this idea and realize that maybe we are making the same mistake again, and that from our local perspective the universe is 3D, when in reality, it's a 3D manifold of a higher dimensional space. One t…

Thanks! Honestly, about the implications in terms of physics I am really unsure. Maybe someone else from HN can chime in?

(also, it appears that in string theory, they are considering even higher-dimensional models for our universe...so it feels that 3/4 is rather a lower estimate)

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