Why Can't We Visualize More Than Three Dimensions?

In a two-dimensional universe, everyone would be infinitely shallow.

If time is the 4th dimension I do it all the time. I look at my wife lying in the sun and I can foresee her in the future walking around like a boiled lobster.

Funny a similar thing happens to me when walking on the beach with my wife. If I am not careful I can visualize getting slapped up side the head for looking too long at certain distracting members of the general public laying around in the sun.

GA

what about a colour scale? I've used it with time-framing before to track 3 spacial dimensions, one time dimension, and a change in an extra variable. Trouble is, a colour scale has finite boundaries.

Yeah, yeah - almost everyone has a camcorder nowadays. Big deal! You are right about the finite boundaries, so you aren't all bad. Freakin' Brit!

Oh, and it's spatial, not spacial.

Mike

yep - it is spatial ... woops.

no camcorder - differential GPS, altimeter, pitot tube and matlab.

and I'm not a Brit!

Differential GPS:

Is this different than a "normal" GPS?

So, if I've got this right, you have 2 spatial dimensions defined by the GPS, a third defined by the altimeter, and a velocity as a vector in that dimensional frame.

Are you using a spherical coordinate system, or are you making the assumption that you have a 2-dimensional "flat" plane?

Re: "and I'm not a Brit!"

Could have fooled me with your spelling of colo(u)r.

Sorry!

Mike

Velocity is distance over time. Both are point A to point B. Time is the interval between events. One may locate an object in space OR in time, but not in both.

Take the 4 dimensions and note the 'moment of highest continuity', and you have the 5th dimension. It is not measureable with current instrumentation, but may be observable with a suitable application of Amanita Muscaria, thorouhly dried of course.

Happy Trails!

(Non-USA) English - spelling

Colour, Labour, Specialising, Socialising etc.

You 'Yanks' never really learned English properly. Thank your forefathers for not wearing glasses to distinguish letters, and not attending school ...

DGPS uses two different GPS measurements to give a displacement vector. 2D assumption was sufficient.

btw, Australians like their 'colour' graphs too

We can image an space of "n" dimensions , which properly coordinated, could represent a physical object.

But it happens that with three spatial dimensions, plus another coordinate of completely different nature, called "time", we can represent all the objects we encounter in our world. Three dimensions is the minimum required. More are redundant. The Nature always goes to the "minimum", in this case, three spatial dimensions. Time requires another consideration.

Maybe "cubism", is the art version of the multidimensional space, versus the realistic picture that is what we see around us.

It is like the non Euclidean geometry, when they say that in a plane there are more than an orthogonal straight line to other straight line issued from a given point. It is a geometry that can be used to represent some mental objects, what could lead to new discoveries, but when it comes to the near physical world, it is the Euclidean Geometry what counts.

Arturo

You can't visualize more than 3 dimensions of space, because that is all that there are. Occam's razor dictates that 3 dimensions is sufficient to describe and represent all spacial observations.

The issue is more like; there are more dimensions, but they are not Space per se. For those of us so blessed, we have more senses, measuring touch (pressure), temperature, taste, color, sound, smell. Other dimensions are love, humour, intelligence, and life itself.

What we lack are things like a location sense (due to relativity, it can only be calculated with reference to another object), and time sense (same thing, calculated)

Chris

You can, and you don't even have to cut off your ear - extensive quotes follow:

Cubism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubism

In cubist artworks, objects are broken up, analyzed, and re-assembled in an abstracted form—instead of depicting objects from one viewpoint, the artist depicts the subject from a multitude of viewpoints to represent the subject in a greater context. Often the surfaces intersect at seemingly random angles, removing a coherent sense of depth. The background and object planes interpenetrate one another to create the shallow ambiguous space, one of cubism's distinct characteristics.

http://emptyeasel.com/2007/10/17/what-is-cubism-an-introduction-to-the-cubist-art-movement-and-cubist-painters/

In doing this, the artist is attempting to give a fuller, more detailed explanation of the subject—breaking past barriers of space and time, like in the famous painting by Marcel Duchamp entitled Nude Descending a Staircase

From Apollinaire, (1913)

"Today, scientists no longer limit themselves to the three dimensions of Euclid. The painters have been led quite naturally, one might say by intuition, to preoccupy themselves with the new possibilities of spatial measurement which, in the language of the modern studios, are designated by the term: the fourth dimension." More specifically, Einstein's general theory of relativity found its first artistic expression in Cubist art. The plotting of an object in a field consisting of and defined by the artist's moving point of view suggests, as Einstein posited, a "time-space continuum" whose makeup is contingent on point of view. Also, the rendering of both solid mass and open space with the same pictorial motif -- the plane -- gives visual form to Einstein's theory that energy and matter are different states of a single phenomenon.

My take - if you want a visualization you go to an artist.