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Re:Strangely Curved Shapes Break 50-Year-Old Geometry Conjec... by alistairSH on Wednesday May 15, 2024 @09:10AM (#40366437)
Yeah, the visualization is where I get hung up. Sounds like I need to stop that.

Given your response, is it fair to say time as the 4th dimension is just a sci-fi concoction?

Re:Strangely Curved Shapes Break 50-Year-Old Geometry Conjec... by gavagai691 on Wednesday May 15, 2024 @10:03AM (#40367101)
No, that's not exactly a sci-fi concoction. In special and general relativity, there are three dimensions for space and one dimension for time, and this is not something that is of "incidental" importance to special / general relativity, it's a pretty essential shift in perspective to these theories to think of the universe as (curved) four-dimensional spacetime.

But "dimension" is something mathematical. I would say it doesn't quite make sense to say "is the fourth dimension time" in the same way as it wouldn't make sense to say "is the fifth an apple?" The same way that numbers can refer to different things in different contexts (including in the context of different scientific theories), dimensions can correspond to different things in different contexts. For example, statistics and machine learning heavily use "high dimensional" mathematics, but there the "dimensions" would correspond to different variables you are trying to predict or explain. E.g. if you were trying to predict chance of heart attack from 1000 different factors, then you would have 1000+1 total "dimensions," and in that case the "fourth dimension" might be "cigarettes smoked per week" (rather than time).

Re:Strangely Curved Shapes Break 50-Year-Old Geometry Conjec... by markisus on Wednesday May 15, 2024 @10:32AM (#40367477)
Contextually of dimension even exists within a specific scientific theory. In relativity, the direction you call time might contain some component of the direction I call space. This implies notions like simultaneity are not well defined in a universal context.
Re:Strangely Curved Shapes Break 50-Year-Old Geometry Conjec... by gary_0 on Wednesday May 15, 2024 @10:11AM (#40367199)
No, 4D spacetime is a real thing in physics, which explains things like time dilation and the speed of light. But sci-fi does tend to abuse the term "dimension" for other ideas that are not scientific.
Re:Strangely Curved Shapes Break 50-Year-Old Geometry Conjec... by gcr on Wednesday May 15, 2024 @10:04AM (#40367103)
yeah, nobody can visualize it. it's something you just get used to after a while.

there's an old joke about a mathematician teaching an engineer about thirteen-dimensional spaces. "What do you think," the mathematician asks. "My head's spinning," the engineer confesses. "How can you develop any intuition for thirteen-dimensional space?"

"Well, it's not so hard. All I do is visualize the situation in arbitrary N-dimensional space and then set N = 13."

Re:Strangely Curved Shapes Break 50-Year-Old Geometry Conjec... by philipswood on Wednesday May 15, 2024 @11:25AM (#40368205)
Geoffrey Hinton on visualizing higher dimensions:

"To deal with hyper-planes in a 14-dimensional space, visualize a 3-D space and say 'fourteen' to yourself very loudly. Everyone does it."