hobo

http://www.tenthdimension.com/flash2.php

Cool flash video that goes from 0 to 10 and explains it without technical jargon so we can understand.

FoolThemAll

Cool. Makes me want to re-read Douglas Adams' Mostly Harmless.

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bobby

string theory is hard to understand,but seems to expain a lot of things

.............vibrations !!!


xoxoxoo

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Zeraph

Very nice, very cool. Thank you for posting it. By far the best explaination I've seen.

TexanAvenger

I actually finally understand (albeit a simplified version of) it. I'm very impressed with the makers of this.

Kinda makes me want to buy a book...

ObieX

Finally it makes .. sense.. kinda.. i'll let you know after my brain has finished imploding and reverts to its normal state.

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filtherton

It should be noted that string theory, which at this point is pretty unverifiable, is more math than actual physics, and even amongst string theorists there isn't any consensus about how many different dimensions there theoretically are. Therefore all this multi dimensional stuff should be taken with a grain of salt.

Seaver

String theory makes the Bible look scientific.

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Ch'i

You have to understand String Theory in order to understand M (Membrane) Theory, which is basically a unification of the four String Theory equations.


Nice flash.

aberkok

....and I'm spent!

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xepherys

Wow, that's really... wow! I love physics, and I've seen similar info, but this was put together really well. I may need to read the book.

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CandleInTheDark

So a 10th dimensional being would have complete and total control over it's past, present and future?

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xepherys

Candle,

Yeah, that's about the sum and total of it. True Omnipresence and omniscience would come from being 10-dimensional (at least as far as it's understood currently).

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Lasereth

We can't even design a spaceship to get out of our solar system. How are scientists trying to prove that multiple dimensions exist when we still don't know shit (comparitively) about our galaxy? This all seems a bit far-fetched. I'm no scientist, but seriously, how can you spend time and research hours on something that is unbelievably not empirical? There's nothing but human-made math to back this up. I guess this sorta goes for all astronomical theories that can't be proven though.

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Ch'i

Well, since we don't know that much we have to go out on limbs and make the best and most educated guesses we can. We've been doing it since some lunatic cave man made a wheel.

Seaver

Um... I thought the 4th dimension was time travel.

Yes, but what we have here is a sum which does not equal the solution. So the solution to the problem is change the solution.

3+3 does not equal 7. We all know this. The problem with string theory is they get 3+3 must equal 17. We know that does not make sense, so they say there are unknowns out there that we can not comprehend, so it actually equals 17 only we can not properly rationalize it... but the answer is actually 17.

So, as I said earlier... it makes the Biblical seem scientific.

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Frosstbyte

Unless you can show me a PhD in math or in physics, I'm not inclined to believe that you have even a fraction of the background and knowledge required to understand string theory enough to make the claim that "it makes the Biblical seem scientific."

You're welcome to your opinion about the theory, but please, discuss that opinion. I'm neither a mathematician nor a physicist, but I look at it and it makes some sense to me. How do you come to the conclusion that string theory makes "3+3 must equal 17?" It's a theory, it has gaps. Where it doesn't have gaps, it does seem to make some sense-to me at least. Do you subscribe to an alternate theory that fills in some of those gaps? Or one that contradicts it?

It's very apparent to you that it claims 3+3=17, which we know is wrong. It's not so clear to me either that it claims that or that it's absolutely wrong.

filtherton

I think that maybe seaver is referring to the fact that some of the information contained within the bible is more readily verified than the assertions made by string theorists.

Personally, i'm not so sure how they can get away with calling string theory a theory. Seems like it should be more of a conjecture.

Charlatan

Seaver, as I understand it, the fifth dimension is time travel. The 10th, to us, is omniscience, all possibilities, all realities.

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Ch'i

Yeah I know. I'm not saying the String or M Theories are correct; I'm saying that we have to start somewhere.

Very understandable; did you ever here about the scientific communities' acceptance of the current, ridiculously flawed, not-even-a-theory for gamma-ray bursts? Its absurd.

Charlatan

Yeah, I know what you mean. According to the theory I was supposed to get super strength and turn all green when I got angry. In the end all I got was cancer.

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Ch'i

Ah yes, lymphoma theory.

Toaster126

I thought the fourth dimention was time. And the fifth was a tesseract, ROFL.

Man, I haven't read a Wrinkle in Time for 10 years and I remember that shit.

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Frosstbyte

A tesseract is actually a fourth dimensional "cube." Here's the wikipedia on it, complete with a really trippy rotating tesseract about 3/4 of the way down the article.

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

CandleInTheDark

As I understood:

A 4th dimensional being would be able to see it's past, present and future.

A 5th dimensional being would be able to see all of it's possible pasts, presents, and futures.

A 6th dimensional being would be able to transport (via folding of the 5th dimension) to any of the possible pasts, presents, and futures of that universe.

So the sixth dimension is time travel.

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ktspktsp

That's a pretty cool flash vid. I can't say it all 'fits' yet, but I certainly have a better idea of what's going on now.

Frosstbyte

I think "time travel" as we generally think of it is a 5th dimensional being moving in 4 dimensions. Usually we think of time travel, as popularized by media, as going back in time to create a 5th dimensional fork-that is, change the past, create a new future timeline. I think that's mostly traveling in the 4th dimension since the 5th dimensional being just needs to go back on one timeline to change something in it to create a fork.

One of my friends who is into high level physics told me that the explanations in this flash are a little off from what he's learned. Past 4, it defeinitely gets hard to wrap your head around.

Yakk

That video looks like junk.

First, to describe a universe containing every quantum possibility, you need infinite dimensions. Not just 5. Infinite. Quantum superimposition gets interprited as interaction between non-orthogonal parts of this infinite dimensional space, and Quantum collapse as a rotation of two parts into being orthogonal to each other.

They cop out and call this "the 5th dimension".

Second, the mobius strip example -- which works perfectly fine if you use a simple loop. The use of the mobius strip adds nothing to the description. There are uses for the mobius strip in dimensional analogy, but that wasn't one of them. So they lose points for "extra confusion for no reason".

It continues being cheesy from then on out, and more addle-brained.

Most practically, it ignores the most common interpritation of String Theory -- which is that the higher order space-like dimensions are tightly twisted up -- alot of the gobbly gook he is talking about gets thrown out. While the 3rd dimension can be viewed as a bunch of slices of flatlands, the one we are in isn't such a bunch of slices of a flatland universe with any kind of reasonable flatland "laws of physics".

The ant on the wire analogy explains the situation much better.

Take a line. That's a 1 dimensional structure.

But if you took a cable, and looked at it from far enough away, it would look like a line. From far enough away, your position on the line would be described by only your position ALONG the line.

If you zoom in, the diameter of the cable starts to matter. To an ant, the cable is two-dimensional: it has a length, and a circumphrence. To describe the relative position of two ants on the line at a scale the ants care about, you need both the position ALONG the line, and where AROUND the line you are.

The top String theories is that the 6 "missing" spacial dimensions are very much like that cable. They are tiny, curled up dimensions.

...

String Theory is a mathematical model that, as far as we can tell, is consistent with the physical world. As yet it has not made any verifiable predictions that have panned out that where not also predicted by much simpler theories.

Attempts to verify some of the most interesting predictions of string theory which are not predicted by "simpler" models have, as yet, failed to pan out.

What String Theory brought forward was a way to deal with the indeterminate location of Q-M and mathematical singularities that fall out of particle theory. By treating fundamental building blocks not as 0 dimensional points, but at 1 dimensional strings, alot of singularities in the math go away.

One thing that makes String Theory "not even wrong" is that String Threory can describe way way more universes than one. So it doesn't make predictions as much as admit possibilities. And we lack the ability to say that String Theory rules out a particular possibility.

String Theory is a theoretical framework which physisics are playing with. It has some wonderful philosophical advantages over some of the competing frameworks, and is currently in vogue. However, it has yet to pass the test of making and standing behind a surprising prediction.

They are attempting to test some of the surprising possibilities put forward by string theory, but they haven't succeeded yet.

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Last edited by JHVH : 10-29-4004 BC at 09:00 PM. Reason: Time for a rest.

BadNick

Can I at least rest peacefully tonight knowing that there can't be an eleventh dimension? A simple yes or no will do ...if possible.

I'll just listen to this twice:

hulk

Mmmph. Time is not 'the' fourth dimension. Time travel is easily possible - we're all doing it. Right now. Marching off into the unknown future. We can even control it, to a degree, by approaching the speed of light. If we were all two dimensional (and not just in personalities) we'd still be travelling through time.

If memory serves me, the most common description is that our universe has 3 spatial dimensions, and one time dimension. The 4D universe would have 4 spatial dimensions, but still one time.

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filtherton

Dimensions are funny. We've actually got a lot more of them in this universe than 3. There's temperature and luminosity and charge and mass and many more. I'm not sure why space and time get the most attention. Probably because they are the most easily observed.

MageB420666

Wait..... when did any of those become dimensions? Seems to me that several of those are measures of energy and fields.

I think there might be a little confusion with definitions here... possibly due to the flash video. If something is a TRUE 2D object, it will not travel through time, it will simply exist, because it always has(i.e. its not traveling through time). When ever people try to explain 2D, such as the ant on the newspaper example, they incidently show you a 3D example with time being the third dimension as opposed to depth. Remember, its counting the dimensions involved, not labeling them. If there were a true 2D ant on a 2D newspaper, it wouldn't be able to go anywhere or do anything due to a lack of time to do it in. Unless it was a really weird ant that could somehow operate outside the dimension of time.

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hulk

If we were true 3D, we'd exist in XYZ co-ordinates and not travel through time. I guess we're 4D, then?

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filtherton

It depends on how you define dimensions. While space and time get all the play in popular culture, physicists and scientists can and do define a dimension as any kind of basic quantity through which other quantities can be expressed. Take a Newton: kg*m/s^2. The dimensions of the Newton are mass, length, and time

Time and space are just measurements of time and space, nothing special about them really, except perhaps that they are the most viscerally experienced dimensions. Maybe time is unique in that it is the dimension in which things happen. Beyond that, space is nothing more than a set of other dimensions that don't happen to be linearly dependent.

hotzot

my brain hurts!!!

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