Higher spacial dimensions

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Not sure if I should have wrote this in the science forum but I suppose it is theoretical so may count as philosophy.

I have been interested in this idea of higher spatial dimensions. You may know that string theory requires higher spatial dimensions.

The physicists reckon these higher dimensions are not visible to us because they are curled up so small that we cannot see them. However, I am wondering if these higher dimensions (if they exist) are not visible because either:

1 - there is no link between our 3d universe and the 4d universe

or

2 - they are just as present as the other dimensions but we cannot access them for some reason

What does anyone else think?

And if you believe in god do you think that god could be found in these higher dimensions?

Last week I was teaching my six year old granddaughter (who is a genius) about magnets and "magnetic lines of force".

I said "Do you know what a magnetic line of force is"?
She said no.
I said "That's right. Neither do I. Not even the top scientists in the world understand what it is".

She said "But scientists can make all kinds of clever things. They must know what it is".

I said "No they don't". They don't know what magnetism is, they don't know what gravity is and they don't know what time is".

I am not sure if she believed me.

No one knows what causes gravitation, but there is an excellent theory (Einstein's General Theory of Relativity) that can describe how it works. Ditto for electromagnetism. Quantum electrodynamics makes correct predictions good to 12 decimal places. One does not have to know what anything is. It suffices to know how it works.

ruveyn

Do you know what "is" is?

Multiple dimensions is a feature of Superstring theory or M theory and says that the universe exists in 11 dimensions. Scientists may get the chance to see if higher dimensions exist with experiments at The Large Hadron Collider. The main reason why this accelerator was built was to look for the Higgs boson which is theorised as an explanation to why things have mass. This may also find the elusive graviton which came out of the solution to the Euler gamma function, represented as a closed loop of string vibrating in the lowest frequency having a spin number of 2. The hypothetical graviton is theorised to be able to leave this univese and travel to another universe. This would be detectable by the disappearace of the graviton.

Multiple dimensions were first thought of by Charles Hinton a mathematician and spitualist of the 19th century. He come up with the inea of the hypercube which is also called a Hinton cube after him. an unwrapped hypercube ia known as a tesseract and looks like a sort of a 3 dimensional cross. If a four dimensional object interacted with our universe we would see a 3 dimensional object changing shape and growing and shrinking till it disappeared from our universe. A book was written by Edwin Abbott in 1844 called Flatland and is about a 2 dimensional world called flatland and a 'person' (a square) meeting a dot which grows into a circle of increasing size to a maximum and decreases to a point. He can't work it out as he has no concept of up or down. The sphere picks the sqare off flatland and he sees everything as 2 D cross sections of our 3 D world. This book was supposed to be describing what a 4 D object would look like to us.

This is a projection of a hypercube into two dimensions.
The small cube in the center of the larger cube looks smaller because it is further away into the fourth dimension. And also the six truncated pyramidal shapes between the smaller central cube and the larger outside cube are actually cubes also but perspective makes the more distant face look smaller. Of course, the intervening cubes between the inner and outer cube are impossible to be actual cubes in three dimension since the whole thing is merely a projection from four dimensional space.

I made some tesseracts using toothpicks and glue.

ruveyn

Thomas Campbell speaks of other realities in his trilogy "My Big TOE", wherein he postulates our physical reality (universe) is a holographic virtual reality, and we are all avatars operating within its constraining rule set.

He presents his thoughts on his My-big-toe.com website, and several interesting videos are available on youtube where he explains his theory.

Tom was one of the engineers that assisted Bob Monroe in the development of hemi-sync technology, and resulted in what is now the Monroe Institute.

I'm not very good at this kind of thing, so let me see if I can get this right:

The "smaller" cube appears smaller because it is further away in the 4th dimension.

The "outer" cubes (not the "bigger" cube, but the surrounding cubes) appear as pyramids because they are somewhat stretched (visually) by the 4th dimension?

It's not unlike the effects of the event horizon of a singularity. Space in terms of one dimension, we'll say "length," is itself stretched in such a way that an inch is still an inch, but due to the warping of space-time, may appear to actually be a meter. I think the highly technical, scientific term for this is "spaghettification."

Is that about right?

It is merely a matter of perspective, no fancy space-time stuff.

If you looked at a normal "skeleton" cube such as this sketch of the three dimensional cube in two dimensions
[img][800:1006]http://img828.imageshack.us/img828/1323/cuben.jpg[/img]

you can see the cube face further away is smaller in representation because of perspective and the side faces of the cube are seen as trapezoids instead of squares because of perspective distortion. The same effect takes place in the four dimensional cube representation. Perspective distorts the side cubes into truncated pyramids.

Oh, I get it, now. Like the way train tracks seem to terminate on the horizon at a point?

So, would perspective be the 4th dimension here?

i used to be really interested in this, especially in trying to visualize some of the forms.
i think, though, it needs to be kept in mind that even calling the space we dwell in, "three dimensions", is only a metaphor & thus "the fourth dimension" is a metaphor of a metaphor...

those theories with 11 dimensions, or things of fractional dimension, are a mathematical convenience; they could just as well call the aspects anything else. you cannot go there.

m.

So in this example, using time we can shuffle from one cube being visible to the next, yet in reality (that's obscured by the dimension we perceive this in) they are in fact all cubes?

Is that empirically testable? If it isn't then it is just a speculation.

ruveyn

This is the trouble that arises when we use plain english.

When physicists or mathematicians refer to an n-dimensional space, it is a space in which a point can only be uniquely identified by using n distinct elements.

So, for example, in two dimensional space (a flat plane), we can identify a point in two simple ways: how far that point is from two arbitrary lines that intersect with each other (they need not be at right angles, btw, but that's the convention), or it's distance from a fixed point, and the angle that the resulting line segment makes with a predetermined line.

When we expand to three dimensions, there is an entire line of points that satisfies those two dimensional reference systems, so we need to find a way to identify a specific point on that line in some fashion.

When we expand our definition of a point in space-time to higher dimensions, we are simply ascribing new characteristics to it--time has often been identified as a dimensional characteristic.

Now, when we create a higher dimensional mathematical model, we don't always know what those higher dimensions represent. We test the model, and we find that it provides reliable results in conventional space-time, so that gives us some confidence that the model is a sound one, even if we don't know the mechanics that lead to that.

Consider mathematics. When we look at polynomial equations, we know that some equations have no real solutions, but, when we expand into complex numbers, we suddenly find that every polynominal of degree n has n complex solutions--a very elegant results. We can't identify what a number like i√2 means in the real world, but we know that it is a solution to the equation x^4 - 4 = 0.

Mathematics is, fundamentally, the study of patterns. If we can create an artificial system that completely describes that pattern, then we can predict how that pattern behaves. We don't have to know how the mechanics of gravitation work to know that we have a cogent model of how it functions. Now, obviously, we would love to know how gravitation actually works, but in the meantime we can work with the model that we have to try and better understand it.