91–100 of 101 posts
The comparison to children playing with blocks makes me wonder: If you spent long enough playing with these 4D toys, would you develop a deeper intuition for the 4th dimensional shape of the objects?
I’m sure most of us could learn a visceral understanding of 4D if we could push and twist 4D objects.
I am genuinely surprised for a long time that I've not seen 4D monsters in films. It has been so obvious to me there's potential there. It would of course be a flat 2D projection of a 3D slice through a 4D creature, so it would look like a smoothly morphing between different creatures, and in and out of existence so we've sort of had morphing for a long while (since Willow, C. 1985) but... there's potential. In case…
I am genuinely surprised for a long time that I've not seen 4D monsters in films. It has been so obvious to me there's potential there. It would of course be a flat 2D projection of a 3D slice through a 4D creature, so it would look like a smoothly morphing between different creatures, and in and out of existence so we've sort of had morphing for a long while (since Willow, C. 1985) but... there's potential. In case…
The comparison to children playing with blocks makes me wonder: If you spent long enough playing with these 4D toys, would you develop a deeper intuition for the 4th dimensional shape of the objects?
I'll ask any physicists out there. A 4th spatial dimension probably doesn't exist, right? Even if we couldn't perceive shapes across a 4th dimension, we would still perceive things moving through the 4th dimension like we see in 4D toys. In reality we don't ever see anything like this (spatially anyway). Is that correct?
If there were 4 spatial dimensions + 1 time dimension we would end up in an unstable universe. Ehrenfest (1917/1920) studied the hydrogen in n dimensions and concluded for n> 3 that neither classical atoms nor planetary orbits can be stable, because the inverse square law of electrostatic and gravity becomes an inverse cube law. When n > 3 there are no stable orbits to the two body problem: an incoming light body att…
I'll ask any physicists out there. A 4th spatial dimension probably doesn't exist, right? Even if we couldn't perceive shapes across a 4th dimension, we would still perceive things moving through the 4th dimension like we see in 4D toys. In reality we don't ever see anything like this (spatially anyway). Is that correct?
Obligatory "I'm not a physycist, but...". String theories require extra spatial dimensions (to total of 10, 11 or 26), but those dimension are so small and/or looping so that we cannot detect them. Other approach is to treat our 3D space as slice of higher dimensional space. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_theory#Extra_dimensions String theories have a lot of problems (biggest ones is that they are currently unv…
Makes me appreciate that relativity and quantum mechanics are verifiable experimentally.
It would be interesting to see how it would look with the 4D scenes properly projected instead of cross-sectioned. I mean that is how we get 3D scenes on our puny 2D displays; we don't generally do the sort of cross-sections for 3D like they show in the flat-land example except in some specialized applications. Of course cross-section is still valid method of visualization. I don't know enough about higher dimensiona…
Well, we get 3D scenes/projections on a 2D screen by being in a 3D world/context and looking at a 2D screen. With that I mean to say that I think (not sure) a 2D image of a 3D projection can only feel 3D if you're in a 3D world. This also means such a thing should be possible for living in a 2D space and then projecting a 2D world on a 1D screen. If you're going to play with 3D projections of 4D objects, then in orde…
I love 4D graphics. Many years ago, in my freshman year of college, I wanted to create a 4d space game, and spent about a year grinding out an OpenGL rendering engine. I taught myself the requisite mathematics and realized that my conception of hyperspace as operative in my game, was fundamentally wrong. So I moved on. Still have the code laying around, although I lost the Linux port I ginned up at one point. Really…
I'm curious, in what way was your conception wrong? Sounds like it could still be interesting.
However, - and this is obvious when you work through it - when you use Euclidean distance (https://mathworld.wolfram.com/Distance.html - see the General equation), the distance travelled increases, thus obviating a key part of my game, which was to "jump" through hyperspace to shorten the trip. I didn't care to rewrite math enough to make the game work out, and since I'd spent so much time learning math, graphics,and larger-scale program design, I was burnt out. It was a great experience.
One day I might return to the notion, but it'll be around the hyper-dimensionality experience, not as a combat game. I don't like the slice mode of 4D games qua the OP, I far prefer projections from 4D as a way to understand the 4D realm.