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Dimensional numbers: Practicality or happenstance?

October 11, 2007 by MainFragger

MainFragger's picture

I am a laymen, but due to curiosity I've been reading several books on Quantum Mechanics and String Theory and Parallel Dimensions and the Zen like nature of the universe..

My questions are more of a flight of fancy than anything.. But I am curious to see what others think..

1. Do you think the numbering system for dimensions makes sense?

2. Do you think that the numbering system might change if we found out that there were actually other directions to move in besides up, down, left, right, backward, forward?

3. I know mathmatecially it makes sense to think of diagonals as part of the x and y axis.. But do you think it makes sense for diagonal to actually be its own form of movement or dimension? (which would technically make it the 4th dimension).

4. If you had to renumber the dimensions, how would you do it? Why?

For the sake of adding my own thoughts, I am going to answer a few of these questions here..

1. Undecided for now...

2. I think that if we found new ways to move, the dimension numbers should change to reflect the new level of knowlege..

3. I think in time we may find that over extremely far or extremely short (micro sized) distances having a seperate measurement for diagonal might come in handy. I've been trying to figure out what that math might look like, and haven't done so yet.

4. OK, this ones a doozy.. But I keep trying to think of the universe as a machine with moving working parts. With everything seeking to occupy it to the best of its ability in the tradition of Boyle's law..

so for the first dimension:

MATTER! As far as we know, everything in our universe is made from it. The more dimensions we can see into, the more we can see of it. But this is the basic building material of the universe and is the most tangible part of our universe.

2nd dimension:

TIME: Everything may exist.. But nothing moves or happens without it. Time is both a relative position in existance,and is a form of pressure that advances everything along from creation to termination. This is the engine of our universe.

3rd dimension:

GRAVITY: Gravity holds everything where it belongs and moves everything that needs to move. It is an invisible force, but its presence is very tangible in effect. Gravity is the cogs and belts of our universe.

4th dimension:

MAGNETISM: Another invisible force. Some argue that magnetism is a relatively weak force, and that gravity is stronger.. But if this is the case, why can even a small magnet pull a piece of metal off of a table in a way that defies 16 lbs. of constant gravitational pressure? Or that gravity does not seem to seperate atoms that tend to be at a consistant distance from eachother set by electromechanical forces. Furthermore, why can a small weak magnet support the weight of a much bigger stronger magnet and prevent it from falling? To me magnetism is the glue/epoxy/fastener/nuts and bolts of the universe.

5th dimension: Random.. I am not sure what this is made of, it might be heat, cold, radiation, or other forces we have not yet discovered. I'd like to skip it and leave it open..just in case..

6-9th dimensions:

Direction/Movement

Beyond that, the rest is currently speculation. I know that depending on which school of thought or which math you choose to support, there can be anywhere between 10-16 or even an infinite amount of dimensions.

And at this point, I'll add one more question:

If you had to take an educated guess what the next dimension might be.. How would you describe it? What would its practical use be?

MainFragger

Comments

other way around..

October 14, 2007 by MainFragger, 2 years 6 weeks ago
Comment: 25465

Movement along distance are actually byproducts of time. I don't know the how or why the universe makes something move. But without time, the movement would be impossible, perception would be impossible. Technically all the matter of the universe could exist, but if time never advanced no one and nothing could observe it, and therefore it might as well not exist. I tend to think of the universe being very boolean.. You need certain factors to exist or not to exist for certain events to happen. In boolean terms, matter+time+events=existance of the universe. If any of matter, time, or events don't exist, then existance of the universe is at a 0 state. Because no matter, no referential points to measure anything by, no time, nothing happens or advances, and no events, no way to observe the passage of time and matter never changes state or form and there would be nothing to observe.

4th, 5th and 6th Dimensions

June 15, 2008 by Anonymous, 1 year 23 weeks ago
Comment: 30663

Could these dimensions just be continuations of the dimensions we already know? Could they be symmetrical with the layout of the ones we see--only involving time?

  • The 4th would be linear time equivalent to the 1st dimension we know of--the minimum for the existence of time--or "point time", that can only go one way. This dimension is coupled to the first 3 and allows for causality.

  • The 5th dimension would be flat time, back and forth, side to side and decoupled from the 3rd dimension. A car moving forward and then backwards doesn't mean that the time elapsed is linear. Which allows for going backwards in time as the car is moving forward and so on... Yes, this is a strange place.
  • The 6th dimension is the up and down part of time. It is equivalent to how we can jump from one spot to another while a little ant MUST travel the entire distance on his little feet. But the further we jump across 2 dimensional space the more energy it takes. Hugh leaps across flat time would take more energy. This is where time travel would be possible. Quantum entanglement is allowed by the properties of this dimension plus the 5th.

Notice, we have SEEN evidence of these activities in these dimensions at high temperatures and in quantum particles. As the universe temperature cooled these dimensions shrank to quantum particle size.
Thanks for your time.

Terence Mills terencemills@netzero.com

Diagonal Dimension

October 13, 2007 by Anonymous, 2 years 6 weeks ago
Comment: 25460

Consider your floating in deep space and you have the ability to control you movement. You have forward, back, right, left, up, or down, but it is only realy 3 direction; X axis or right or left, Y axis or forward and back, or Z axis which is up or down. To move diagonaly you just move in two of the axies at once. you can move in any direction you want and still be described as moving in any of these three axies.Oddly enought because of perspective if someone were to travel in a "Fourth Dimension" it would appear to a stationary observer that the traveler was shrinking as he traveled...
Time is considered the fourth dimension because it is used as our universal constant to compare the amount of energy used to travel between two points. Consider the question, " if a train is traveling at 50 MPH(amount of energy) for 2 hours(amount of time) how far does the train go?" We know it goes a 100 miles because we know the energy the train has and the amount of time it travels. Time is simply a by product of speed of movement and distance. For movement to exist there doesn't neccisarily need to be time, it would just be instantly jumping from point a to b; But for time to exist the must be movement, if the whole universe down to the smallest atom were to stop then time would cease to exist too

Do you mean another "orthogonal" dimension?

October 12, 2007 by Anonymous, 2 years 6 weeks ago
Comment: 25441

MainFragger,

I think you mean having an additional "orthogonal" dimension, rather than diagonal. A diagonal dimension, as 'coglanglab' mentions would be decomposable into contributions from other dimensions, but if an an additional dimension is "orthogonal" is can't be decomposed into such contributions as its vector projection onto all of the normal dimensions would have zero value. But, I like your description of it as "diagonal" in that we humans have trouble physically imagining a fourth spatial dimension along which an object may move. One could draw it at a diagonal, but remember and use the mathematical relationship of it actually being orthogonal.

-- Candice H. Brown Elliott

Still not totally sure..but..

February 12, 2009 by MainFragger, 41 weeks 6 hours ago
Comment: 34476

I just finished reading flatland, and I started thinking about starting out with one dimension. Now looking at one dimension basically means you are looking head on at a dot. Now, cut that dot in half and let gravity take over.. If you split top to bottom, the dot should split and form a small a left/right line.. If you cut instead left to right, you get amall up/down line. Cut it both ways, and you get get up.down, left, right lines at the same time.. From there things get a little complicated, because you move to a 3D realm, and in essence, you cut the same four ways, but for some reason, when the split occurs, you end up with looking at the top of a square that is no shorter than the pieces you cut and that fell away.

Now that is much as we can cut and observe a difference dimensionally speaking. But we can actually imagine roughly what another dimension might look like because we can still cut 8 slices, which represent the 3d cube, and another, dimension, which may be imagined as being diagonal.

Well, I still have to work on that a bit to flesh it out..

But the more I think about it, the more I still don't agree with using x and y cordinates as a diagonal measurement.. Because when doing so, I don't think you are actually denoting a direction, so much as a differential rate of movement. In other words, you are expressing a diagonal as a rate of change from an x and y position to another x and y position. Whereas in a true diagonal, you are expressing a number that is a straight measure of distance from point a to pointt b.

To put it in Heisenbur Uncertainty terms, I view a true diagnoal as where something is, whereas using two other existing dimensions is stating where you roughly (not necessarioy exactly) expect it to be. Heisneberg says you can't predict where something is and where something is going to be at the same time. So, if a diagonal is a true straight line with its own physical position, it can't be measured using the up down left right planes.. It has to have its own plane. Otherwise, diagonal is not a true direction, it is just a contrivance of other existing planes.. Kind of like visually lining up dots on sequenced panes of glass till they look like a line..but they aren't really a line. They are just dots.

MainFragger

Diagonal Dimension

October 12, 2007 by MainFragger, 2 years 6 weeks ago
Comment: 25432

When I picture a diagonal dimension, its kind fo an overlay. In other words, picture all the matter in the universe is in the up, down, left, right, forward, backward dimensions, but somehow diagonal is seperate from that. It also has the matter in it, but somehow none of the movement of the diagonal dimension directly intersects with any of the movement of the other dimensions. I am thinking of more of a concept than actual indication of movement. We might not even be able to see diagonal movement. But if we knew how to take advantage of it, it might help make more efficient use of fuels when vehicles or space craft are turning and fighting rotational or gravitational forces and allow for more direct paths to far away objects.. The laws of gravity might even be different in such a dimension, but I am not sure of what the differences might be at this point.

is diagonal a dimension?

October 12, 2007 by coglanglab, 2 years 6 weeks ago
Comment: 25430

Re: #3. Nothing is stopping you from having a different term to mean moving diagonally, but it doesn't make sense as a dimension. I'm not sure how to explain it exactly, but part of having an "x" dimension and a "y" dimension automatically includes being able to move along both dimensions simultaneously -- that is, diagonally.

Please try my web-based experiments



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