Well, can you find a fifth coordinate to describe a point in time-space that actually has meaning to a human?
Look up "Plücker coordinates" and "Plücker space".
don''t waste your breath trying to convince someone that they can perceive more than that.
Einstein had hope for the world and so do I. If I or anyone else can help one person to understand, then it is all worth it.
I think we can safely say that we ''live in a 3d world.''
We don''t live in a 3D world. Most people only understand a 3D world. What you perceive is actually a 3D projection of reality.
What are Octonions good for?
quote:Original post by JONSKI
We don''t live in a 3D world. Most people only understand a 3D world. What you perceive is actually a 3D projection of reality.
Ah, yes, but what is the reality from which this 3D projection comes, though?
quote:Original post by JONSKI
Care to write-up a proof on that?
We cartainly live in four as you can count them: three of space (e.g. ''up'', ''forward'' and ''side'') and one of time. These four are all we need for the physical phenomena we percieve, including Newtonian mechanics, electromagnetism and Einstein''s special relativity. Hardly a proof but convincing enough for me.
In general you can''t prove things in physics. You can only provide enough evidence, e.g. experimental evidence, so that a reasonable person will be convinced. And the evidence that our universe is four dimesional is pretty overwhelming.
General relatively postulates that our universe is curved and one way of curving it is by embedding it in five dimensions (the same way that the two dimensional surface of a sphere is curved in three dimensions). But the curvature is so slight that on the local scale we are used to the universe is essentially ''flat'' and so four dimensional.
More speculative physics postulates that there are still more dimensions, 11 or more, with the extra ones curled up so tiny a scale that they cannot be directly perceived. But this is far from universally accepted and even if they exist they look nothing like the dimensions we are used to.
quote:Original post by jperalta
Living in n-dimensions and perceiving only n-dimensions are in practical application the same thing. Day-to-day life for me consists in living in a 3-dimensional spatial world and the only time this would ever change were if, like in Flatland, I were yoinked out of the realm of perception I live in and given a way to understand the 4-dimensional perception of things. However since it isn''t terribly likely that this will happen any time soon I think we can safely say that we ''live in a 3d world.''
It is possible to percieve higher order dimensions via careful observation. You don''t have to be ''yoinked'' out of anywhere. Specifically, it''s possible to detect curves in space with measurements over long distances.
Read the book ''Sphereland'' for more information. (Do I sense a theme developing here?)
I think the main error in the claim is not how many dimensions we live in (as this has not been very well established yet), but that it is the reason why quaternions are useful to us. The way we use quaternions in graphics has nothing to do with a temporal dimension, or even a further spatial dimension.
Author
WTF are you guys talking about??? Take this discussion into the lounge please. After ''googling'' about Octonians I decided to post this thread as I could find no _game_ related applications to it (and if someone tells me to google something again I swear I will find a way to destroy google.com). Flatland seems like a cool book though, you can ''Amazon'' it for $1.50 or .29c used.
"Love all, trust a few. Do wrong to none." - Shakespeare
Dirge - Aurelio Reis
www.CodeFortress.com
Current Causes:
Nissan sues Nissan
"Love all, trust a few. Do wrong to none." - Shakespeare
Dirge - Aurelio Reis
www.CodeFortress.com
Current Causes:
Nissan sues Nissan
quote:Original post by Dirge
WTF are you guys talking about??? Take this discussion into the lounge please. After ''googling'' about Octonians I decided to post this thread as I could find no _game_ related applications to it (and if someone tells me to google something again I swear I will find a way to destroy google.com).
Given that this thread has diverged well away from Dirge''s focus, I am closing the thread. I don''t mind the theoretical discussions, and if folks are interested in continuing to talk about this, please start a new thread.
Graham Rhodes
Senior Scientist
Applied Research Associates, Inc.
This topic is closed to new replies.
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