Barbelith Underground > Laboratory > Multidimensional thinking.

Except where used in the mathematical sense odd jest describes, which is not really what we're talking about, I don't think time works as a separate dimension because, while a little brainbending can get you to a point, plane or line, you can't visualize an object that exists in a time dimension but has no spacial values. (Ghosts, you say, or God. Always described in 3D terms to schoolchildren and in physically meaninless ones to other people.) Neither can you visualize one with spacial values but no time value: "I've got a two-meter cube that doesn't exist anywhere in time" is beyond abstract -- it's nonsensical. Once you've got an object to consider, it has a value=t. Time is the intersection of dimensions, or maybe the equation that solves problems in dimensions, but it's not a dimension itself.

What if [2D people] used something like sonar to gain an impression of the shapes and distances of objects in their paths? Or what if they have something like x-ray vision, perceiving particles that can exist in the same 2D location as whatever they'd be passing through, yet are altered in a way by that passing to carry certain perceptual information as does light about color?

Sonar is waves -- a 2D wave is only a line that moves up and down, like a Pong cursor. Particals would be lines that started very short and got longer and longer as they approached. So maybe 2D people would see as old printer cartridges prints, one line at a time. It'd be a slow place.

Uh, where did the thing about the hair go? I can't quote it, it's out of my field here. When you go up 20' from the hair, you're losing it in its 3rd dimension. In your example it has length and depth, because you have moved directly upward from it. What it doesn't have is width. Neither does the floor you're above; you can't lose it in the broad floor. The floor, to your 2D eyes, is a slice of floor, partially occluded by the hair, which you ought to be able to see.

Uh, am I stupid to think of superstrings at this juncture? Probably, since I've never really been able to wrap my head around them, but it seems relavant. Superstring theory posits some kind of sub-quantum thread running through particals which has no mass, energy or velocity of its own but wraps around itself in such a way that it knots, forming quanta. Or something like that. Anyway, an object which exists solely on a different plane than what we can perceive.

A 4D-superstring-person might be able to touch the inside of the onion, but it would only touch a sub-sub-atomic part of it, from the 3D onion's point of view. The onion would be smeered out flat across the 4th dimension, or else in a hopeless knot -- I'm not sure which. The 4D person would be imperceptible to us because they're too small.

Now I ask you. Is probability a physical dimension?