This is a brilliant piece of simple, yet profound, scientific understanding, that anyone with a high school education should be able to follow. I can't imbed it so I provide this link.
John D. Barrow, in his book, The Constants of Nature provides a very neat graphic (p. 222 of 2003 Vintage paperback edition) that demonstrates why 3 dimensions of space and 1 of time provide the most 'livable' universe (my term, not his). Barrow has written extensively on the 'Anthropic Principle' in all its manifestations, and I keep promising myself that I'll write a post on it one day.
4 comments:
I'm trying to conceive of 4 dimensions of space but can't get my head around it. Any ideas or suggested readings?
The article Imagining Other Dimensions from Nova's website is helpful: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/imagining-other-dimensions.html
Actually, a tesseract is a 4 dimensional cube or hyper cube.
If you unfold a 3 dimensional cube into 2 dimensions you get a 'Christian' cross. You have a square off every square plus an extra one so that it connects.
A hyper cube has another cube of every face of a 3 dimensional cube. Barrow gives the best illustration on p.211 of the book I reference in the post.
Regards, Paul
Actually, there is a good discussion of hypercubes on YouTube.
Regards, Paul.
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