Understanding the 4th Dimension! (Will make your brain explode)

[Kavachi]

I get so frustrated about people saying time is the fourth dimension. Scientificly time can never be the fourth dimension because time is not a full dimention. It's a half dimension.

To expand: The first dimention is length. On a line (which is one dimentional) you can go either left or right.
The second dimention, width, adds another 2 movements; forward and backward.
The third dimention, height, adds another 2 movements; up and down
Time however, adds only 1 movement. You can only go to the future, but you cannot go back to the past (it's true, hot tub time machines do not exist).
This is why scientists see time as a 1/2 dimention, and because of that it cannot be the fourth dimension.

I hope that cleared up the concept of the dimension of time.

 

[Gondito]

I get so frustrated about people saying time is the fourth dimension. Scientificly time can never be the fourth dimension because time is not a full dimention. It's a half dimension.

To expand: The first dimention is length. On a line (which is one dimentional) you can go either left or right.
The second dimention, width, adds another 2 movements; forward and backward.
The third dimention, height, adds another 2 movements; up and down
Time however, adds only 1 movement. You can only go to the future, but you cannot go back to the past (it's true, hot tub time machines do not exist).
This is why scientists see time as a 1/2 dimention, and because of that it cannot be the fourth dimension.

I hope that cleared up the concept of the dimension of time.

Thats exactly what I was thinking. Also If time was the 4th dimension. what would the 5th, 6th, etc dimensions be? There goes that theory.

 

[Nalgas D. Lemur]

But if you want something that'll really melt your brain: Time is not consistant or linear, it's bound by gravity. Then try to comprehend what gravity really is. HURGHHHHHH.

Can I get a source?

Go read up on general/special relativity and how time is perceived differently (or even passes/is measured differently) in different situations. You get all kinds of weird stuff going on when the speed of light is constant (in a vacuum, etc.) but the places you're measuring from are at different speeds relative to each other/their surroundings or introducing large masses (and thus large curvature of space). All sorts of wacky thought experiments that'll leave you confused until you finally have an "Aha!" moment (and real experiments to back them up, too).

As far as the article goes, it's kind of silly. I skimmed through it until I got to the god part, and then I just gave up on it. It would be nice to see something like that written by someone who actually knows what they're talking about instead of someone demonstrating that they don't really. I am one of those people who has done the math/geometry/topology/etc. to have a decent grasp on the idea of arbitrarily many dimensions, whether it's 4 or 17.

Yes, it is kind of weird to try to visualize it, because it's impossible to directly. The best you can do is have mathematical representations of it (which is not really any more complicated than 2D or 3D stuff) or projections of it into 2D or 3D space, the same way you have a 3D image (like in a game you're playing, or a photograph) projected onto a 2D surface (your TV/monitor, a piece of paper). Getting a sense of how rotating those projections works and a feel for how it's analogous to 3D stuff on a 2D surface can be a bit tough at first, since at least you can actually see 3D objects and know intuitively how they work, but when you add more than that...you don't. There's actually an awesome free video series some university in France made that I'll link if I can remember where it is. It's pretty good for helping to understand how that sort of stuff works, and even if you don't really get it, it's still pretty to look at.

I'm interested in trying the game, because I've considered how to make something like that myself before but never really did anything with it, because while the math for keeping track of everything isn't much worse than for the usual 3D stuff, I could never really figure out how to make an interesting game out of it. If this guy did, high five for him.

 

[Megacherv]

You do know we live in a 4D universe, but we can only see 3 dimensions, the four are:
Length
Width
Depth
Time

And the universe is made up of a 4D "fabric" called spacetime. That's the theory anyway, I think it has been proven but I can't remember.
Heres's a link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacetime

I think he was on about 4 directional dimensions.

 

[Burwood123]

He's talking about 4 SPACIAL dimensions, and time isnt spacial, no one know what it really is, but without it. everything would happen at once

 

[Nalgas D. Lemur]

This looks like the video [http://www.clearbits.net/torrents/206-dimensions---a-walk-through-mathematics] I mentioned in my previous post, I think. They have it streaming on their own site, but only in French, so unless someone else has put it up somewhere else, you need to actually download the whole thing if you want subtitles (which you do if you don't speak French, or it will make even less sense). It takes a few chapters before it really gets going, but that's a good thing, because the first couple are spent explaining how the different types of projections work and giving simple examples in 2D/3D before jumping into the scarier stuff in higher dimensions.

Edit: It looks like they may actually have a streaming version in English [http://www.dimensions-math.org/Dim_E.htm] now, but someone else will have to check. They didn't before when it first went up, but that was a while ago.

 

[KeyMaster45]

You hear that noise, it's the sound of my mind being blown.

Spoiler: Depicted here with gratuitous violence

That Carl Sagan video really got me interested in his work, I'm now digging through Ebay for copies of his show.

 

[Outright Villainy]

I find the whole 4th dimension thing quite intresting, especially trying to visualise hyper surfaces. My friend is big into maths and he makes my brain leak quite often with this kind of stuff.

 

[SPCF]

I'm interested, but I don't want to bother trying to understand all that :/

 

[flaming_squirrel]

Can I get a source?

Fairly sure it was from QI, they discovered that the internal clocks in satelites and other devices outside our atmosphere would run at a different pace to 'standard' time.
But unlike how a watch looses time this was at a constant rate rather then just being un-synched.

 

[Gasaraki]

The guy from Kotaku kept saying that the game made his head hurt but judging from the video it wasn't really that strange, fairly simple really...

 

[zen5887]

People really need to watch this.

 

[TheBaron87]

I lean toward this idea.

 

[Redlin5_v1legacy]

Ouch, ouch, ouch... I'll be scraping up the debris of my gray matter now.

 

[MKScorpion]

lolwut? I still have no idea what this is. =\

 

[Zeromaeus]

I get so frustrated about people saying time is the fourth dimension. Scientificly time can never be the fourth dimension because time is not a full dimention. It's a half dimension.

To expand: The first dimention is length. On a line (which is one dimentional) you can go either left or right.
The second dimention, width, adds another 2 movements; forward and backward.
The third dimention, height, adds another 2 movements; up and down
Time however, adds only 1 movement. You can only go to the future, but you cannot go back to the past (it's true, hot tub time machines do not exist).
This is why scientists see time as a 1/2 dimention, and because of that it cannot be the fourth dimension.

I hope that cleared up the concept of the dimension of time.

If I understand it correctly, which i probably don't (side note: ouch, my brain), we can't perceive the full dimension that time/duration/whatever takes place in. It appears to move in one direction, because we can only perceive it in terms of three dimensions. If we were, say, pushed through time by a four dimensional ... thing, we could end up at any point in our lifetime, but only as our past self (urgh, comprehension failing me). If I understand it, which I probably don't, one would have to "fold" through the fifth dimension, which would in turn be sixth dimensional movement, in order to consciously move oneself through time to any point past or future. I (ow, headache) Probably got this all wrong, but I would like someone to correct me if I am. I am unfortunate to find extra dimensions fascinating.