Re: Purpose of life
 

I don't think the picture could exists or be viewed without time.

And even e picture has depth.
No surface is 100% flat as in 2 demensional.

We only like to think that sumting is 2d or without depth

Re: Purpose of life
 

i begin to wonder, dimensions are just 'tools' for us humans to understand the world we live in. Perhaps there are other ways we don't know off. Like this, we have a sense of the world, via the 5 senses we all hopefully have:

- eyes
- ears
- smell
- touch
- taste

you could say, we intercept (recieve) 'life' in 5 'ways'. (channels?). PM talks about 4 dimensions, and we can't take a picture of a whole, simply because T (time) is always 'moving and changing'. I think we humans can definatly picture 4 dimensions. Something like watching a video would even 'capture' 4 dimensions although you view it on a screen (which will likely change in the future where you can just walk into your own movie, being projected as if its happening right now).

Perhaps there are more dimension, but we are not aware of them. Like i said, you can say we have 4 dimensions, but assume there is a 5th called 'death' (or alive). You could say that at the 5th dimension we at this moment (we, being all in the same 'level of the 5th dimension') have to work with eachother. People who die, could 'gain' to the next (or previous) level of the 5th dimension, thus not meeting us (at this level of 5th dimension).

See it like:

X,Y,Z,T,D(level)

We are at (for example)..

X,Y,Z,T,D(2)

perhaps some people are at

X,Y,Z,T,D(1)

where D(1) also means that this 'level' can mean that the entire world , all material is in another 'stage'. Like you have - sub-universes. Who says there is only ONE universe? I also wonder how it is possible that some people do experience 'death' or 'previously bad things that happened'. They can feel it, so something must be 'left behind'. Or even more creepier, there is some 'connection' to this 'world' we cannot see...

I still believe we have more then 4 dimensions PM, dispite your very convincing explenation about the 4 dimensions.

Re: Purpose of life
 

I would say: today’s 4 dimensions is the way to describe world as we understand it today (wait for next dimensions to come ;) ). All the five senses you mentioned can be expressed in 4d system as well: at the given time you see, light gets to your eye and the electrical signal goes to your brain… and so on with other senses. All can be described very precisely. For the physical world this representation seems ok for today. …aren’t we off the subject?

Re: Purpose of life
 

and when you wreck the boss you save the princess and you see the end credits ? :D


</joke> ;)
Of course we have! Don't get me wrong. I did not say we only have 4 dimensions, I said we can only represent ourselves 3 of them and we only know 4 of them. But there are obviously way more! Because we don't know them doesn't mean they don't exist, and on the contrary the intersection model nD space = intersection of 2 n(D+1) spaces should confirm you that. Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if there was an infinite number of them. :) And for sure, goes without saying, other Universes (which is in fact the same thing as other means to represent it). We know only 4 dimensions in our Universe, as if we knew of a road at night only what a lighting pole makes visible. If you land near another lighting pole, you'll recognize nothing of the road, but it'll still be the same road. If you were "projected" into other dimensions, you'd recognize nothing of our Universe, but there would nevertheless be the same matter, the same things, you would be talking to the same guys, you would be living the same life as now - the only thing is that you could simply not recognize it. Science progresses, and new theories are made, only when from a new lighting pole a scientist manages to recognize the same things he was viewing when he was near another lighting pole. That's exactly what Einstein did to find out the general Relativity: he dropped completely Euclidian geometry, and took the Riemann geometry instead (which states that a square angle is more than 90 degrees, that the sum of the angles in a triangle is more than 180 degrees, and that parallel lines do not exist). Look up for Riemann or Lobatchevski on google, you might find out what sort of weirdos these guys were and what they did :)

*edit*
I've found a little explanation
http://www.upscale.utoronto.ca/Gener.../Geometry.html
there may be better ones though
If you're not fond of math you can start reading at the middle of the page where it says: "In 1817 Carl Friedrich Gauss wrote: ....." The rest is very accessible.

*e 2*
oh and wea yeah, I think we've come quite offtopic too =)

Re: Purpose of life
 

the next chapter in my linear algebra lectures is about projective geometry and states that 2 circles on a plane have 4 intersection points, if not identitical. We only have 2, but the others are at infinity ... I'm really looking forward to it, since it's something you can imagine, at least a bit - maybe even something to contribute here. But for now I gotta go back to phi invariant subspaces, nilpotent matrices, so that's gonna be a hard night ...