How science works (the sequal)

[Cognisant]

How would you or indeed could you express 3D space to a flatlander?*
*: A literally 2D person.

Generally when we explain things we use metaphors, referring to something similar to transfer the intended property to another concept, for example if you don't know what "spherical" is I could say the Earth is shaped like a ball and you'd understand I mean it's spherical. Isolating the definition of spherical to a purely abstract concept makes this process easier by eliminating potential misinterpretations.

Anyway you can't do this when the concept you're trying to convey has no analogue to refer to, you could say to a flatlander that the third spatial dimension is just like the other two except going up and you'll have them right up to that last bit.

If a flatlander lives on a infinite 2D plane how is it supposed to understand an infinite 3D space, to the flatlander this is infinity multiplied by infinity.

Anyway what prompted this (and any physicist is probably miles ahead on this train of thought) is the idea that as you reduce reality to its most fundamental fundamentals you would start reducing the number of dimensions. So you'd be trying to figure out how events on a 2D plane could produce or at least simulate a 3D universe, indeed if we include time then we live in four dimensions so how does our fundamentally four dimensional universe exist without time?

 

[Ex-User (5841)]

I would think expression is a fallacy here. You'd need to go about transformation instead, e.g. give the 2-D shading, a mirror, and a drawn on pair of 3-D glasses.

 

[onesteptwostep]

If we're going to talk about being literal, how would a 2D person have consciousness?

But um, if I were to answer that question, I think math would be the answer. The 2D person wouldn't be able to experience the reality of a 3D being in its totality, but it would be able to conceptually envision it with the aid of math.

EDIT: Or, it could be that we ourselves see the world in terms of 2D anyways. What I mean by that is that photons that arrive in our eyes land on a flat/conclave surface. We sense depth, distance and size by the use of intuition, shading, and so on. But this is so innately ingrained in us that we perceive the world in terms of three dimensions. We would have to use our sense of touch or a comparative measurement to validate our sense of the 3 dimensional world.

 

[DrSketchpad]

How would you go about explaining that? Well, I'd try point out the difference between 1 and 2 dimensions. "You know how you have this way and that way? Try imagining if you only had THAT way", then if possible I'd try to add another dimension (you know, JUST add another dimension)

... indeed if we include time then we live in four dimensions so how does our fundamentally four dimensional universe exist without time?

A static, unchanging universe? This seems odd. I couldn't even imagine the "beginning" of it though. You couldn't have a big bang. Would it just be a singularity forever being singular?

No changes to perceive, no perceiver to anticipate change in the first place. I think like the 2D-3D thing it's pretty impossible to imagine without including things exclusive to your respective set of dimensions in mind.

Although, there is a fourth spatial dimension, it's not exclusive to time. Time is just "the fourth dimension" to the continuum of spacetime. We could have 4 spatial dimensions and time as the fifth dimension to that universe, right? There's a great possibility that I'm incredibly wrong, but that's my understanding.

From the great Wikipedia:

A temporal dimension is a dimension of time. Time is often referred to as the "fourth dimension" for this reason, but that is not to imply that it is a spatial dimension. A temporal dimension is one way to measure physical change. It is perceived differently from the three spatial dimensions in that there is only one of it, and that we cannot move freely in time but subjectively move in one direction.

On a less related note. This got me thinking of life in 2D. I was trying to think of how a life form would see. Could they have "photons" to reach them? Echolocation comes to mind. You'd have to have a zipper body to eat/digest similarly to us. If that gains traction I'll make a new thread, don't mean to derail

Fun to think about though.

obligatory hypercube link

http://hypersolid.milosz.ca/

 

[DrSketchpad]

If we're going to talk about being literal, how would a 2D person have consciousness?

But um, if I were to answer that question, I think math would be the answer. The 2D person wouldn't be able to experience the reality of a 3D being in its totality, but it would be able to conceptually envision it with the aid of math.

EDIT: Or, it could be that we ourselves see the world in terms of 2D anyways. What I mean by that is that photons that arrive in our eyes land on a flat/conclave surface. We sense depth, distance and size by the use of intuition, shading, and so on. But this is so innately ingrained in us that we perceive the world in terms of three dimensions. We would have to use our sense of touch or a comparative measurement to validate our sense of the 3 dimensional world.

It would less efficient that's for sure. Along the same line (I could make spatial jokes all day), imagine a fourth dimensional brain.

*third dimensional brain explodes*

That's where two eyes come in though. We perceive depth because there's two images coming from two slightly different angles.

 

[Cognisant]

You'd need to go about transformation instead, e.g. give the 2-D shading, a mirror, and a drawn on pair of 3-D glasses.

So synthesize the experience for them?

The problem is you're already trying to create an illusion of something that's already quite apparent, in a 2D plane a 2D person would see a circle beside it as a convex wall in front of it, so it's perfectly capable of understanding two spatial dimensions but no amount of trickery will make a third appear because the 3D vision affect is an artifact of our binocular vision processing upon a 2D plane that is facing us, a 2D person would never see a top-down view of his world.

 

[Cherry Cola]

science is the reincarnation of a corpse's afterbirth, it shall be carried through the streets in a large yacht by fifty strong healthy and beautiful napolese women as spaceships descend upon the begotten progrenitrix sphere

 

[DrSketchpad]

science is the reincarnation of a corpse's afterbirth, it shall be carried through the streets in a large yacht by fifty strong healthy and beautiful napolese women as spaceships descend upon the begotten progrenitrix sphere

No no, that's how Botany works. It's not reflective of science as a whole. You make a good point though.

 

[Ex-User (5841)]

So synthesize the experience for them?

The problem is you're already trying to create an illusion of something that's already quite apparent, in a 2D plane a 2D person would see a circle beside it as a convex wall in front of it, so it's perfectly capable of understanding two spatial dimensions but no amount of trickery will make a third appear because the 3D vision affect is an artifact of our binocular vision processing upon a 2D plane that is facing us, a 2D person would never see a top-down view of his world.

That's the best I could come up with. Sometimes it's infinitely easier to, for example, dose someone with LSD instead of attempting to communicate your own experience with it.

How would you explain 2-D to a 1-D, where there isn't even a precedent of comparison? Why'd you pick 3-D to 2-D anyway? I could totally copypasta your above response into a faith argument... re-frame it as "How can one teach a nonbeliever about god if they can't see it?," but I don't see the point atm. 2-D doesn't really exist outside of a fictional/mathematical construct, amirite? A drawing on paper is still 3-D, just thin.

 

[addictedartist]

all dimension is connected to the origin point mathematically; the earth is shaped kinda like an egg on its side with an equal radius as if the pressure of the galaxy is pushing down on it like a tennis ball on the floor but the floor itself may be hard but is like a blanket which the ball rolls around the heavier points on the blanket; our heaviest point being the sun which is part of a binary system but the movement is not perfectly circular its more like an oval as the law of averages never remains at the average, the balance of motion keeping relative to time and position within the densities of matter, each acting in an ocean of currents, if you were to observe our solar system as it travels with the planets as a vertical line representing a two dimensional representation of a multidimensional concept the sun would be the line and the planets would become a spiral formation where the planets are shifting the axis at which they view the sun as well as preforming revolutions which results in a rhythmic tip of the spear which looks like the medical symbol, the snakes being the planets serpentine dance around the sol and their effect on humanity. The term lunacy coined from lunar events causing people to lose their minds.

 

[Reluctantly]

I think the only way for the flatlander to understand 3d, when they only experience 2d, is to experience 3d. They need to find a way to break out of their 2d world; they need to enter a new 2d world that runs concurrent to their original one, where anyone that only sees 2d would believe they were different realities...and anyone finding new 2d worlds would come to see how the many 2d realities are linked together in the third dimension of space-time.