Seeing in Four Dimentions | Tomorrow Museum

This is an aside titled 'Seeing in Four Dimentions' dated 8/25/08

Our nervous systems are only equipped to conjure images in three dimensions. Yet Étienne Ghys of the École Normale Supérieure in Lyon, France is creating videos to help people see in four. “How on earth can we visualize such a thing? Ghys and his colleagues begin by pointing out that our challenge in visualizing four dimensions is very similar to the one that would be faced by a perfectly flat creature who lived in two dimensions and tried to visualize three, like the inhabitants of Edwin Abbott’s Flatland or the lizards in the page in Escher’s Reptiles. A cube or a sphere would be nearly unimaginable for the two-dimensional lizards, since they are unable to rise out of the plane.” (via.) Maybe next they could make a movie out of Christopher Priest’s Inverted World.

Posted by Joanne on Aug. 25, 2008 Tagged: math, Science

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