Anyone got any Mind Blowing Questions?

[JBroll]

There will still be something left over in the morning, don't worry.

You're assuming (quite incorrectly) that space is 'outside' of things and can be separated from everything else - this would have been at best debatable before the 20th century began and is flatly contradicted by relativity. The aquarium analogy fails for exactly this reason - everything 'in' space interacts with space itself! The space that you're assuming to be this big void, like a blank sheet of paper that the universe is 'drawn on', has its own geometry, its own interaction with the things inside it, its own bizarre properties... it changes and is changed by the things that you think are strictly inside (and not interacting with) it! You have assumed - entirely without justification - that this separation you're making is possible and you have yet to demonstrate why this is the case - for this reason, I didn't even need to give an argument against your redefinitions in the first place. What you're saying is simply not possible, at least in the form you've presented.

Hopefully this clarifies why your angle doesn't work (again, long story short, it is interacting with 'the universe' too much to be separated from it in any coherent way)... and, if not, at least why you still have a great deal of work to do if you want to establish anything on your assumptions. You're assuming far too much, even in the face of things (like that relativity business) that show quite clearly that your assumptions aren't very sensible or justifiable, and so the burden of proof is entirely on you.

JBroll, we need more awesome physics/science/cool shit threads from you. you always get into arguments, and spew awesome sentences all over the place, but i haven´t seen threads from you lately. make some threads on things that interest you! we like it! you make yourself heard in the awesomest of ways, and as such are a great teacher

I've been busy moving about and studying., so I haven't been doing much of anything lately. I was tempted to have some layman's introduction-sort-of-thing for a while, but I've only recently gotten settled into my new apartment (I started the moving process in May, had a conference and classwork in June, and moved in early this month... whee!) and up to speed with the research I'm supposed to be doing. I haven't decided if I'd be interacting much with reality, but I'm really tempted to start a more geometric rambling thread and start building algebraic and topological toys in until shiny fun toys could be described.

Jeff

 

[ittoa666]

This thread was supposed to be funny and such, but alas, it is not.

 

[Empryrean]

When using almond butter(like peanut butter w/almonds though)
is grape jam or strawberry jam more suited to ensure that the AB&J sammy will automatically get the ladies?

no takers?

 

[JBroll]

I'd go with grape and blueberry to make the sandwich better and a meal that doesn't remind one of poverty and laziness to get the ladies.

Jeff

 

[vampiregenocide]

There will still be something left over in the morning, don't worry.

You're assuming (quite incorrectly) that space is 'outside' of things and can be separated from everything else - this would have been at best debatable before the 20th century began and is flatly contradicted by relativity. The aquarium analogy fails for exactly this reason - everything 'in' space interacts with space itself! The space that you're assuming to be this big void, like a blank sheet of paper that the universe is 'drawn on', has its own geometry, its own interaction with the things inside it, its own bizarre properties... it changes and is changed by the things that you think are strictly inside (and not interacting with) it! You have assumed - entirely without justification - that this separation you're making is possible and you have yet to demonstrate why this is the case - for this reason, I didn't even need to give an argument against your redefinitions in the first place. What you're saying is simply not possible, at least in the form you've presented.

Hopefully this clarifies why your angle doesn't work (again, long story short, it is interacting with 'the universe' too much to be separated from it in any coherent way)... and, if not, at least why you still have a great deal of work to do if you want to establish anything on your assumptions. You're assuming far too much, even in the face of things (like that relativity business) that show quite clearly that your assumptions aren't very sensible or justifiable, and so the burden of proof is entirely on you.

Just to say on that final point, the burden of proof is on anyone in an argument/debate, otherwise its just statements, which I can see mine will be seen as because I can't quote any sources.

But yeah I see your point and I understand maybe I was distancing the relationship between space and the universe too much. I realise space has properties, but it can still apply to my idea. I mean...I dunno man its hard to put into words. I know what I want to say, and if I could say it right it probably wouldn't sound so stupid. Your point has raised some flaws in mine, but hasn't completely disproved it. I'm just gna have to go with what you say for now man because I can't be arsed to argue anymore.

 

[Zehailiu]

@Jbroll
It would be cool if you could help us visualize what a 4 dimension cube or sphere looks like, I've always wanted to know, hehe. ^^

 

[vampiregenocide]

@Jbroll
It would be cool if you could help us visualize what a 4 dimension cube or sphere looks like, I've always wanted to know, hehe. ^^

Isn't that what a tesseract is? And theres a video of someone on youtube explaining how to turn a sphere inside out in a certain way, hurt my brain.

 

[JBroll]

Just to say on that final point, the burden of proof is on anyone in an argument/debate, otherwise its just statements, which I can see mine will be seen as because I can't quote any sources.

In some cases this may be true, but right now you're the one making a claim and I'm waiting to see why it's valid - the usual example of 'I don't need to prove that there are no invisible pink unicorns in this room' is exactly what's going on here.

But yeah I see your point and I understand maybe I was distancing the relationship between space and the universe too much. I realise space has properties, but it can still apply to my idea. I mean...I dunno man its hard to put into words. I know what I want to say, and if I could say it right it probably wouldn't sound so stupid. Your point has raised some flaws in mine, but hasn't completely disproved it. I'm just gna have to go with what you say for now man because I can't be arsed to argue anymore.

Read a good book or two on relativity and pick up Brian Greene's books and you'll get a better idea of why you can't do what you're trying to do.

@Jbroll
It would be cool if you could help us visualize what a 4 dimension cube or sphere looks like, I've always wanted to know, hehe. ^^

For 'showing' there are better graphics than I could make outside already. The way I'd do it... I've explained the general idea (viewing a four-dimensional object by gluing together three-dimensional 'slices', the same way one could make a sphere by 'gluing' circles of appropriate diameters), once I find it I'll polish it up a bit more.

Jeff

 

[Rick]

I think Jeff's post count tripled in this thread.

 

[vampiregenocide]

Read a good book or two on relativity and pick up Brian Greene's books and you'll get a better idea of why you can't do what you're trying to do.

I just bought a Chuck Palanhuik and Halo book, and I don't read a great deal as it is. That's not likely to happen.

 

[JBroll]

You bought a Halo *book*? Halo as in the video game series?

Jeff

 

[josh pelican]

Why do people go to tanning salons in the Summer?

 

[jaretthale78]

Why do people go to tanning salons in the Summer?

cuz they slutz

 

[JBroll]

The first seven words of that suit the thread well enough - there's no lower risk of cancer and tanning is overrated anyway.

Jeff

 

[Zehailiu]

A slice of a 4D shape in 3D is a 3D shape, a bunch of such slices put together would turn, say a sphere, into a tube that zips from the creation of that sphere to its demise, wouldn't it?

 

[JBroll]

I can't tell if you're onto the right idea. Making two-dimensional slices of a three-dimensional thing - like slicing a potato in a mandoline - can be 'undone' by stacking the slices back together. If you had an 'ideal' mandoline that could make slices of thickness zero, you'd have two-dimensional objects - look back at your calculus textbook for better pictures than I could give.

What's an easy example of a four-dimensional space? Spacetime (unless we're mindblowingly wrong about very fundamental things) as we observe it is going to be just that. Stand still for a moment and fix a perspective - decide, once and for all, what 'up', 'forward' and 'left' movements look like, and you have a basis for R^3 (R, as usual, denotes the real line), and deciding 'later' to be the direction in time gives, when combined with our basis for space, a basis for spacetime. (Important note: we are choosing vectors in a space, and since we want to distinguish between, say, left and right, we must choose - for each of 'up', 'forward', 'left', 'later' - a positive direction. In this way we have 'down' = -'up', 'earlier'= -'later', et cetera. Don't forget this or everything will be silly - we are doing nothing but picking a basis for the vector space R^4, which - combined with the usual ideas of 'distance' - give just about all we need to do here in a strictly mathematical sense. We can do linear algebra without a basis, but we don't want to right now.)

Once you have these choices made, you can formalize (in the usual multidimensional-integration sense) our gluing process from two to three dimensions. Arranging each slice so that it lies entirely in one 'height' (i.e. parallel to the - again idealized - floor) and ordering them as they were sliced is then the geometric idea of integration (in a special, slightly stupid case for illustrative purposes).

With what we want to do in four dimensions, we can take time to do what height was doing in the previous example - instead of having two-dimensional slices stacked vertically we can imagine three-dimensional slices 'stacked' through time. If we 'pulled out' a slice from the stack in the previous example, we'd have a simple two-dimensional object, and if we continuously browsed through the slices we'd see a bunch of circles growing or shrinking according to the position in the stack and direction being browsed - think about how in older movies a retinal scanner would draw a line across the eye, and imagine instead that we're scanning with a horizontal plane and our slices then correspond to positions of the horizontal plane. If we were already seeing four-dimensionally, doing the same would show three-dimensional objects - we can't do this yet, but we can pretend that we can (one slice at a time) by letting our 'slices' be three-dimensional figures. Suppose that we wanted to look at a four-dimensional hypersphere - it shouldn't be hard to convince yourself that if we sliced a perfectly circular potato with an idealized mandoline we'd have smoothly varying slices as we went along, and the higher dimensional case will be similar. If you were then to live entirely in a plane (the flat kind, not the flying kind) and someone were to show you each slice individually, you could imagine a sphere as a sequence of circles varying through time. In the same way, if some four-dimensional purveyor of fine hyperspheres who wanted to show you his wares, he could show you the 'slices' of his hypersphere - a continuously varying family of spheres. You could then think of a hypersphere in the following way - if you were shown a four-dimensional sphere as just described, you'd see a point, then a growing sphere, then a shrinking sphere, and finally another point (and the rate of size change is easy to calculate, as will be seen shortly) and from these it would be possible to put the hypersphere back together.

How do we know that what I'm saying isn't completely stupid? We can do this with numbers (or at least letters that want to be numbers) very easily. A two dimensional circle in the plane (say, centered at the point (0,0) and of radius 1, for simplicity) is the set of points (x,y) satisfying the equation x^2 + y^2 = 1. A sphere (centered at (0,0,0) and, again, of radius 1) is similarly described as the points (x,y,z) satisfying the equation x^2 + y^2 + z^2 = 1; a hypersphere (centered at (0,0,0,0) and, just to be unsurprising, of radius 1) is described as the set of points satisfying the equation x^2 + y^2 + z^2 + t^2 = 1. (There is one warning to make: unless your idea of a potato is hollow, I am now talking about 'idealized potato skins' - hollow balls - instead of 'real' potatoes - solid balls - because then I just have to type 'a is equal to b' and not 'a is less than or equal to b'. The idea stays the same if you just have to have solid balls - replace = above with <=.)

What I am doing is fixing one of these variables, looking at the lower-dimensional solution set, and then seeing how these solution sets vary as the previously-fixed variable changes. In the plane example, we picked a value z_0 in [0,1], plugged it in for z, and solved the simpler equation x^2+y^2 = (1-z_0^2) - since we had z fixed, the right-hand term is just a real number and the points (x,y) satisfying this equation are just the intersection of a plane (specifically the plane z = z_0) and the sphere. The intersection is, unsurprisingly, a circle of radius 1-z_0^2. In the example we really care about, I'm putting some real number in for t, looking at the resulting equation (which cuts out a sphere - except when t=1 and the equation describes a point), and then seeing how the equation (and thus the solution set - our sphere) changes as t varies. The result is that, as t takes fixed values in [0,1], we only need 3 dimensions to describe the solutions to the 'smaller' equations in x,y,z, and as t varies we can see each 'slice' of the hypersphere.

This example is very simple and easy to generalize when a simple equation like the above describes the surface in question. It can even be applied multiple times to view 5, 6, ... dimensional objects, although there are then lots of choices of things to fix and, as a result, more variables are fixed and more choices of parameters to vary come about. It is not as easy, although it is still possible (see calculus II or III notes for the three-dimensional version), to describe things that aren't smooth like this - 'hypersquares' and pentatopes get a little bit weird, and those are just four-dimensional versions of squares and triangles, respectively - but hopefully your mind's eye will get a better grasp of four-dimensional thinking through these examples and less work will be needed as practice happens.

Jeff

 

[joelozzy]

 

[Tomo009]

Couldn't understand a word of the post 2 up, but what I know is, its not really possible to conceive what a 4D object actually would like because it is out of our understanding. What we can do though is see what a 3D "shadow" of said object would be, just as we can see a 2D shadow of a 3D object.

ie. The tesseract, the shadow of a 4D "cube"

 

[pink freud]

Couldn't understand a word of the post 2 up, but what I know is, its not really possible to conceive what a 4D object actually would like because it is out of our understanding. What we can do though is see what a 3D "shadow" of said object would be, just as we can see a 2D shadow of a 3D object.

ie. The tesseract, the shadow of a 4D "cube"

"Picturing" a four dimensional object (if we agree that time is the fourth dimension) is impossible because it ties into the Uncertainty Principle. You can't know the exact physical characteristics of an object while at the same time observing said object's passage through time, as said object is constantly changing at the atomic level.

 

[Varcolac]

Given quantum butterflies and whatnot; if you were to make an exact copy of the Earth circa 1935, down to the subatomic level (without getting into the whole Heisenberg observer effect thing, just to simplify matters), and run it again, without any further external input, would it arrive in the same version of 2010 that we have now? Would the carbon-copy inhabitants of this second Earth experience the same twentieth century that we did? Or would free will, or the illusion thereof, create a subtly different world? Would the Manhattan Project have been a quantum fluke in Oppenheimer's brain away from not discovering nuclear fission? Would the Enigma deciphering have been a similar chance in Turing's brain away from kicking off the computer age? Aside from the immediate impacts of these on the Second World War, what would a 20th century without nuclear power or computers look like?

Basically, if you rewind reality and hit play again, do you get the same result? I'm hoping not, because I like the idea that my will is my own rather than a predetermined set of chemical processes, but my brain is a set of chemical processes, and there's nothing else that makes me "me." Impossible to find out really, unless someone creates a way to go back in time and create a quantum xerox of the solar system.