there are other lies that will take you nowhere useful.

IMO Good models of reality are seeded by creativity, then tested for mathematical violations and finally sought out via observation and experimentation. The most elegant of these become generally accepted.

http://www.translationparty.com/#1831244

#101 There are many people in the world who have no concept whatsoever that string theory even exists, or what it entails – particularly ideas of other dimensions in parallel to our own. This video is designed to help people visualize and grasp at least the concept of multiple dimensions. It doesn’t claim to be anything more. In that respect, it is an entree to the concept for those who may not have given it prior consideration – ‘an introduction.’

If the makers of this video engage people’s imagination, inspire them to learn more, open their minds to other possibilities, and generate interest that may lead them to learn more about the theory, then what is the harm? If it’s just about your precious ten minutes and semantics, then my sincere apologies.

Yes – this notion of the “ideal state” is that which I was originally seeking to draw attention to. Sides only exist as “ideal states” but “ideal states” do not themselves actually exist. It is in this sense that I claim there is no such thing as a one sided piece of paper.

I like the way you point out that a square piece of paper is really a type of flattened cube – I missed this when I was thinking last night and you are of course right. The circular piece of paper would, as a flattened cylinder, then be a “three sided” object in some sense.

I don’t agree with “But in actuality a physical piece of paper has two sides or surfaces. Moebius strip has fewer. One.” which just ignores the progress we’ve made.

Think more about the irregularity of a surface revealed under magnification so that it can no longer even be called a surface. The whole idea of a side is shown to be pure idealism. There is no law in nature that tells us a cube has six sides and in some sense no cube does – unless we allow that the cube is just one of these “ideal states” that we refer to in mathematical models of the world.

Please know I mean no disrespect and that I care. My handle points you to Tetragrammaton. It is the lowest common denominator.
I = 9 fruits above them there is no law
Double Y = 50, Male, Female and a glyph that is also a word
H = 8, The bridge of sighs and there are 10 Hs in Tetragrammaton
J = 10 a long stemmed U and a number of completion
V = 22 and the Master Builder
W = 23 and looks like V next to its self

Here we go… Somebody is all of this the rest of us fit into one of the other 4 categories, the consanants if you will (5 groupings). Work the associations on your own and you might come up with something that I missed.

There is also a Greek letter association that can help. Pi, Psi, Hue, Mue. Pi being the circular argument where you cannot tell the difference between them and the Psi or the line, as fibronacci is a line eventually and that is similar to the “truth”. Some stretched it and others have a degree of unsertianty as to why they make it, but the “line” makes it so.

This is the product of 4 years of isolation and entirely too much time on my hands. I hope this helps, after proofing it it makes sense to me but might get a bit confusing to others.

Lovingly,
Nike to Lause… Victory to the People!

That would depend on how many flatlander eyes the flatlander had and what kind of spectrum it sees in.

If it saw all the way through (each multicoloured line image section of) you, it could have evolved an enormous flat brain to image of the whole of you, especially if it ate people on the way through, and found some bits tastier than others.

Yes, what we’re talking about are spatial dimensions, with each one at a new “right angle” to the one before. M Theory says there are ten spatial dimensions plus one of time. How can the fifth dimension and above be spatial, and the first three dimensions be spatial, but the fourth dimension be this nebulous “temporal” dimension (while the discussion of whether “time” even really exists continues to be an ongoing debate in cosmology)? That’s what I explore in “Aren’t There Really 11 Dimensions?”.
http://imaginingthetenthdimension.blogspot.com/2008/12/arent-there-really-11-dimensions.html

Best regards,

Rob

True kicks at the can employ either an experimental scientific method, or a rigorous mathematical framework. It’s unfortunate that it takes 5 years of training to be able to make such a kick, but that’s how it is. Just saying stuff because it sounds cool is no substitute. And just saying stuff because it sounds cool, and passing it off as rigorous theory, is what is being objected to here.

It did claim to help you imagine something that is ofter considered hard to imagine, and I think it should be judged on those terms.

I also feel like there is an awful lot of hostility in the comments and it makes me wonder about the commentators (studied physics in college but now working in a non-physics job they hate; dealing with it by posting hostile comments on Boing Boing. Anyone?)

I took an interesting geometry class where we calculated the number of faces, vertices, etc. on higher dimensional squares. We didn’t confine ourselves to just expanding the parameters from (x,y) to (x,y,z,p,q,s, etc.)

It was fascinating, and totally different from this video.

I don’t know physics, and don’t really care, but thought this video was an interesting thought experiment. Who cares if it’s not accepted? Does that mean it’s wrong, or just a different kind of geometry? Do physicists work in Reimann space? Does that make it wrong?

So now, I too have a problem – two really. Answer these if you will with your higher math and scientific reasoning please. First, if dimension zero is the ‘concept’ of a point, couldn’t there be other concepts of some kind of a starting point? So would that not mean that ‘dimension zero’ was a multitude of concepts and therefore a ‘higher than one’ dimension already? I don’t see how this can be disproven with math or logic, as if that hypothesis is correct there could be other math or logic systems that would produce different starting ‘points’ (pun intended).

Second, when we get to dimension 10 with ‘all possible possibilities and timelines’, we are supposedly left with only a concept again of dimension 10. But what about the concept being the result of only one perspective? Isn’t there a dimension of ‘all possible perspectives’ on the all possible possibilities? Here’s a few – good and ‘not good’, or directed creation and undirected creation. So if a view of time, in which we’re trapped, is a valid dimension, wouldn’t a view of ‘intent’ or ‘source’ be a dimension as well? And every variation in between those absolutes. I don’t think we stop at 10.

OK? So, I’m a mere monk. Explain these extremes to me someone.

It’s as if some of you would go into a visual effects lab and berate people for using cone spotlights in 3DS MAX because they do not represent light as both particle and wave.

There’s no doubt any interpretation of a concept has the potential to mislead if the viewer was not aware of its interpretive nature, but this post’s title is ‘visualizing up to 10 dimensions’. It’s just a way for the mind to digest the concept of dimensions higher than 3. I never thought I was about to be taught a rigorous lesson in mathematics or physics.

Apparently some of you are simply too eager to prove your education background to the internet by picking apart videos intended for children.

There are good ways to try to get an understanding of higher dimensional objects (abstract objects, not saying anything about the existence of such objects in reality), but this video isn’t telling you them. The flatland stuff for 2D and 3D in the video isn’t terrible, the rest might make you feel like you’re understanding something, but I don’t see it helping in any academic math or physics context.

The truth is important. People care about nonsense getting dressed up to sound scientific here, just as they get annoyed with intelligent design doing the same in biology.

I also hope you see the irony in beginning your comment by claiming that people aren’t staying on point, and ending it with an ad hominem attack.

All I meant was that according to what you seem to be saying ‘there are no such things as one sided pieces of paper’ seems to have the corollary ‘there are no such things as two sided pieces of paper’; and that the argument could be advanced that a paper moebius strip is one sided and one edged, if you agreed that a sheet of paper is two sided and four edged.

I agree that a paper moebius strip is not ‘really’ a moebius strip.

#127 anon

Sheet of paper: 6 sides

Circular sheet of paper: 3 sides

Paper Moebius strip: 2 sides

each of course then have their respective allocation of edges :)

If there’s an edge to an ideal Moebius strip there’s only one of it.

1. length (a scan line from a DVD, say, A Nightmare on Elm Street)
2. width (a frame of the movie)
3. Depth (a frame from a 3-D movie)
4. Duration (The motion picture, A Nightmare on Elm Street)
5. Destiny (The plot of A Nightmare on Elm Street)
6. Alternate reality (the plot of the 2010 remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street)
7. All possible realities in the universe (Series, Elm St. 1-7)
8. Alternate universe (Friday the 13th)
9. Multi-universal reality (Freddy vs. Jason)
10 All possible realities in all possible universes. (the genre as a whole, or perhaps the act of storytelling itself)

When all I had to do was fold a dot!

Thanks, dots. Thaots.

Even that much seems strange – 3 surfaces on an object that should have only 1 or 2 (depending on perspective) or would then jump to 6. How bizzare!

If someone can confirm that the Flash authoring is poor, we can score a hat trick.

see? It works.

Exactly. But first you must know the can exists. Then you must have your imagination provoked so you want to know more.