Well according to Wikipedia, that's what a 4D shape looks like. Fourth dimension - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia And they even threw in a little 5D Fifth dimension - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia So there ya go. The next two dimensions. Do you feel smarter?
thats only a simulation, we dont have the mental capability to imagine what a 4-demensional object may look like, simply because we have never seen one and wouldnt know one even if we saw it. pretty much that .gif is demonstrating the fact that a 4-d object unfolds into a 3-d object, just as you can cut out a shpe with paper and fold it into a 3-d object.
That would be a cool toy to play with when you're high. Maybe if it was translucent and had a bunch of color changing and patterning effects.
They already make those. It's a liquid filled cylindrical version of the box. I got one once @ the mall of america.
Yep. To actually be 4D that representation of a tesseract (that's what that sim is of) it would have to have all 90 angles. The human mind can't wrap itself around that. This image is akin to drawing something that looks like a sphere (a 3D object) on a piece of paper.
Psh, 4-D is nothing. Try 10-D on for size: [ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjsgoXvnStY&fmt=18]YouTube - Imagining the Tenth Dimension (annotated)[/ame]
I have enough trouble with 3D, I don't want to fuck with any Ds higher than that. Shit, sometimes I still ponder 2D.
Sadly that is impossible. We can mathematically grasp higher dimensions but we are rooted in a Universe with only 3 spatial dimensions that can be discerned. If M-Theory is correct then the other dimensions if they exist are wrapped up too small to be perceived. Our brains, and the brains of any other life, can only really grasp the 3 dimensions of space and one of time. That's not to say we won't continue to gain deeper understanding of higher dimensional objects, but there is a difference between working out the math and truly being able to grasp it viscerally.
I was confused as fuck throughout that entire video.... interesting though considering the parts of it that I did catch on to.
String theory? Puh-leeze! It's cool to think about, but it's been proven to be mathematically impossible.
Actually it has not. The real problem was reconciling the disparate theories as they were incompatible. Then the concept of M-Theory was born, which manages to show how they all relate to one another. The problem isn't that any of it has been proven mathematically impossible. The problem is that the math is so complex that we can't yet grasp it. The other problem is the fact that many of the derivations are currently impossible to test experimentally, though some progress has been made in that area.