Having played through Star Ocean Till the End of Time again, had me thinking about the fourth dimension. I find it interesting, but I started thinking about how we would interact and perceive the world if we were actually missing out on a dimension.
I find it hard to not live in the highest of dimensions without your world being extremely unstable. If you were a dot on a line, if there was something obstructing your path you could not move around it, you could not even push it past you, you'd have to wait for it to disappear. In fact your whole life would revolve around things spontaneously pop in and out of existence. If you were two dimensional, although you could move around objects, that would not stop objects from suddenly appearing before you and then disappearing. Now think back to being yourself, how many things or objects do you know that only exist in one or two dimensions? How many are not affected by something not on their plane? As far as I know even the simplest of organisms move around and utilize all three dimensions. It just seems silly and a big stretch that we aren't at our highest dimension. Otherwise, why isn't there constant interference from this 4th dimension?
I'm not saying that it's impossible, just implausible.
But you're traveling through the Fourth Dimension right now. Granted, it's unidirectional travel (unless you're one of those weirdo neutrinos or you're fictional like a tachyon).
I like to keep my temporal dimension separated from my spacial dimensions.
=p
Well, at either rate, you're gonna wanna avoid a certain Dingo on walkabout here in the OTF. If you didn't like a 4th dimension, wait until he explains string theory and all those little dimensions rolled up inside.
Hey, I like the idea of a 4th dimension; I just haven't seen any evidence of it. It requires some faith to really believe that for some reason we haven't had any sort of interference. It makes for a great fantasy world, but I don't think I can believe it actually exists in the world that I exist in.
All I'm saying is that it requires faith to actually believe in it, the same kind of faith people put into a religion.
I can mathematically represent a perfect circle, made of infinite dots. That doesn't mean that I think a "perfect" circle is possible in this world because I would require an infinite amount of infinitely small dots which doesn't work out with the idea of molecules, atoms, particles etc. We can get close, but due to constraints on what we can work with it will never be the mathematical equivalent of a perfect circle.
I also don't believe in time being worked in the same manner as the other dimensions. Why does mass stay persistent through time? Why have we never witnessed things jumping?
There's just too much chaos that it would require an omnipotent being to keep in order, to keep up the perception of conservation.
Or is there some fountain of empirical data that I've not yet come across?
Time is just our perception of a 4th dimension, you can't characterize anything without both spatial and temporal information.
About a 5th+ dimension I find it odd too, if there is a 5th dimension nothing interesting is happening here, because weird stuff isn't appearing from nowhere as you pointed out.
Law of conservation has nothing to do with it, if there is a 5th dimension the mass and energy in that dimension is accounted. Furthermore the laws of thermodynamics are only true in certain conditions (i.e. isolated systems for the law of conservation).
Finally, our sensory organs can't perceive everything. Actually we can't percieve most things. We can't sense most particles wandering in the universe because they are almost irrelevant to us, yet they exist. So, from a scientific point of view the existence of a 5th dimension is totally pausible, but not very interesting -in comparison to cold fusion i.e.
I also don't believe in time being worked in the same manner as the other dimensions. Why does mass stay persistent through time? Why have we never witnessed things jumping?
Just a note: Considering Time as a 4th dimension and saying that it works as any other dimension are two different things. Few people is saying that Time is a dimension under the formal definition and then speaking about unlimited time-travel. Actually time travel is often a fancy name for moving very fast in the time axis, which doesn't hurt any physical law at all.
And then you have people that speaks about actual time travel to the past, which is far beyond my comprehension.
Time is just our perception of a 4th dimension, you can't characterize anything without both spatial and temporal information.
About a 5th+ dimension I find it odd too, if there is a 5th dimension nothing interesting is happening here, because weird stuff isn't appearing from nowhere as you pointed out.Law of conservation has nothing to do with it, if there is a 5th dimension the mass and energy in that dimension is accounted. Furthermore the laws of thermodynamics are only true in certain conditions (i.e. isolated systems for the law of conservation).
Finally, our sensory organs can't perceive everything. Actually we can't percieve most things. We can't sense most particles wandering in the universe because they are almost irrelevant to us, yet they exist. So, from a scientific point of view the existence of a 5th dimension is totally pausible, but not very interesting -in comparison to cold fusion i.e.
I think Law of conservation would exist, but it wouldn't likely be perceivable to us if there were a higher dimension.
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Tic-Tock, 4th dimension calling.
Otherwise, why isn't there constant interference from this 4th dimension?
I'm not saying that it's impossible, just implausible.
And there are certainly not 11 dimensions. 11-D is just dumb. Dwarf dumb.
Actually, things do just pop into our perceived existence, they're just very small. It was theorized that subatomic particles pop into our perceived existence at the same time as their antiparticles. At that point, they are called virtual particles. Since these virtual particle pairs are antiparticles to each other (for example, an electron and a positron), and they pop in next to each other, they are quickly drawn to each other, resulting in the obliteration of both particles. The theory went on to say that both particles would remain if something flung them apart.
So, scientists tested the theory by shooting subatomic particles through a particle accelerator. The idea was that if they came between two particles whilst they were busy popping in, the accelerated particles would fling the virtual particles apart. In short, the experiment yielded positive results, particles do just pop into our perceived existence.
A property of virtual particles is that once they are observed, they have been around long enough to remain, and so they follow the law of conservation from that point on. That's why we call them "virtual" particles before they are observed, because if we aren't calling them actual, it doesn't fly in the face of Newtonian physics. :P
The predominant theory concerning this phenomena is that the particles seem to just spontaneously exist because they are "falling" from higher dimensions. This keeps the law of conservation intact.
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Furthermore, although we observe mass to be conserved over time, what would it mean for mass to be conserved over space? Since we observe that the mass of a system at Time 1 is the same as the mass at Time 2, then for conservation over space to be true, we must observe that the total mass in one n-plane, integrated over all time must be equal to the mass in a second, parallel n-plane integrated over all time. I'm not sure we can conclusively say that this isn't true, but it's an interesting thought experiment.
I don't see why everyone says the fourth dimension is time.
H.G. Wells was not a scientist. Time is (like space) a mental construct created by humans to more easily understand and navigate the universe. It is a measure, just as any other thing may be a measure, and there are indeed properties to time, but a unilateral axis of "time" does not exist as we think it does. The closest things to such would be casualty and contiguity.
The relativistic principle of causality says that the cause must precede its effect according to all inertial observers. This is equivalent to the statement that the cause and its effect are separated by a timelike interval, and the effect belongs to the future of its cause. If a timelike interval separates the two events, this means that a signal could be sent between them at less than the speed of light. On the other hand, if signals could move faster than the speed of light, this would violate causality because it would allow a signal to be sent across spacelike intervals, which means that at least to some inertial observers the signal would travel backward in time. For this reason, special relativity does not allow communication faster than the speed of light.
In the theory of general relativity, the concept of causality is generalized in the most straightforward way: the effect must belong to the future light cone of its cause, even if the spacetime is curved.
tl;dr
Time is not a dimension, causality and contiguity are important and you should go read about them more when you have the time, you lazy, lazy internet person.
All of this is a pretty hefty pile of science, and has little to do with the possibility of additional spacial dimensions. It's fully possible that there are more dimensions than those that we perceive, although I cannot think of any outstanding examples that would suggest such a thing, most likely because I cannot perceive them.
I'm waiting for someone to post these classic videos: [snip]
Ah, but this is the Internet, which the Schrödinger/Elliot model predicts is composed largely of the Heisenberg motion of LOLcats. Therefore, by your even mentioning it, the sheer abundance of contraryion particles will likely work to prevent any such links; there is even a much higher than normal probability that attempts to do so will see the links rapidly decay into either a silly cat or Astley video link.
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I'm waiting for someone to post these classic videos: [snip]Ah, but this is the Internet, which the Schrödinger/Elliot model predicts is composed largely of the Heisenberg motion of LOLcats. Therefore, by your even mentioning it, the sheer abundance of contraryion particles will likely work to prevent any such links; there is even a much higher than normal probability that attempts to do so will see the links rapidly decay into either a silly cat or Astley video link.
.
Do you think LoLCats decay and turn into porn? and this explains
all the porn on the interwebs??
People pump in LoLCats, and out comes porn.
Eureka!!
I get that it is theoretically possible, I'm saying that it's a stretch of the imagination. For some reason, the so called 4th (spacial) dimension is for whatever reason inert (except for rare exceptions?) and mostly doesn't interfere with our perceived reality, and also we are flat and do not stretch into the 4th dimension (otherwise we'd have some weird inexplicable hangups being caught on things that we can not perceive rather often). And why is it only from 4th dimension to 3rd dimension that this happens? Why have we never found anything that exists solely in one or two dimensions that can only perceive in one or two dimensions that can only move in one or two dimensions?
I'll need a little more consistent and solid proof than some scientists shooting some particles that they cannot see to see if it interfered with some other particles they can see to prove that particles they cannot see are popping out of a 4th dimension that they cannot see. It doesn't prove that a 4th spacial dimension exists. It might prove that our vacuum containers aren't perfect. Really think about it, what keeps light, heat, and mass from moving around in a 4th dimension if it exists? What's holding everything in place keeping it from rotating around and viewing things from a different angle?
I get that it is theoretically possible, I'm saying that it's a stretch of the imagination. For some reason, the so called 4th (spacial) dimension is for whatever reason inert (except for rare exceptions?) and mostly doesn't interfere with our perceived reality, and also we are flat and do not stretch into the 4th dimension (otherwise we'd have some weird inexplicable hangups being caught on things that we can not perceive rather often). And why is it only from 4th dimension to 3rd dimension that this happens? Why have we never found anything that exists solely in one or two dimensions that can only perceive in one or two dimensions that can only move in one or two dimensions?
I'll need a little more consistent and solid proof than some scientists shooting some particles that they cannot see to see if it interfered with some other particles they can see to prove that particles they cannot see are popping out of a 4th dimension that they cannot see. It doesn't prove that a 4th spacial dimension exists. It might prove that our vacuum containers aren't perfect. Really think about it, what keeps light, heat, and mass from moving around in a 4th dimension if it exists? What's holding everything in place keeping it from rotating around and viewing things from a different angle?
What it really makes me think of is phlogiston theory. (The colorless, odorless, tasteless, massless substance that is contained in all combustable substances and liberated in burning, not the D&D spelljammer nonsense.) Human beings can figure out just about anything we put our minds to, but we're still in the early days of quantum theory.