>I also really like Ian Stewart's "Flatterland", another book written as > a sequal to Abbott's classic. It gets into branes, complex topologies, > ideas about "partial" dimensions, and other modern geometries, written > in a style that is about as light as you can get when discussing such > complex ideas.
I'd never heard of this one. Thanks.
I see on Amazon that there's yet another sequel called _Spaceland_, by Rudy Rucker. Has anyone read that?
>>>Another way is to dig up an excellent but strange little book >>>called "Flatland", whose author is given either as A Square or >>>Edwin A Abbott. It takes you into a world of only 2 dimensions, >>>and then back to three. It helps to visualize 4 spatial >>>dimensions, and you can expand from there with sufficient >>>imagination.
> Jerry Brown wrote:
>>I wish there was an equivalent book for Relativity and/or QM.
> What about the well-known Gamow and Lieber/Lieber books, > or the more recent book by Rudy Rucker?
And Asimov's three "Understanding Physics" books. They are a little dated now, but still excellent. He starts out assuming you know nothing, and explains everything very well.
> Well, fine, I guess. Although I can't then understand why you think > your "flight of fancy" has anything to say about "consciousness", > "spirituality", or "free will and quantum indeterminacy".
Greetings, Here's the thing - once people have viewed my animations, they have been given a new way of imagining higher dimensional geometries (which, I will say again, is not the teaching of mainstream physics, it is just my crazy idea). In the book that accompanies the site, those animations become the first chapter. There are then ten more chapters that get into discussions of how this "way of imagining" can also be applied to a very broad range of ideas from cosmology, quantum physics, memes, fringe science, metaphysics, time travel paradoxes, science fiction, and so on. Those additional ideas are discussed briefly in the chapter summaries on the website. But if you have watched the animations and don't see how this way of imagining is all about "free will and quantum indeterminacy" then I would ask you to please watch again, because that is really the key to the whole idea, and all the other ideas listed above flow from that one.
> Okay then, here's my simple answer. There are parts of science that > say time is not a dimension, but there are also string theorists who > are convinced that time is nothing more than an illusion. The > animations on my website present a new way of thinking about time, > space, and string theory which is not the commonly accepted viewpoint > of mainstream physics, but which may be useful as a tool for trying to > imagine how there could be other universes out there which are just as > real as ours but are invisible to us. As the creator of this "new way > of thinking" and holder of the copyright on the animations, I would > only ask that you give credit to me as the author of these ideas when > you show these animations to your students.
Good things to mention, I'm sure. Oh and students just go to websites now so they'll see whatever credits any other visitors see. This is the 21st century, after all. ;-)
Mike Schilling wrote: > "Gene Ward Smith" <genewardsm...@gmail.com> wrote in message > news:1151648273.274034.34440@d56g2000cwd.googlegroups.com... >> Mike Schilling wrote: >>> "Gene Ward Smith" <genewardsm...@gmail.com> wrote in message >>> news:1151647258.102606.201770@h44g2000cwa.googlegroups.com... >>>> This web site is basically broken; my browser sits there loading data >>>> endlessly, but never shows anything. >>> It works fine for me. I'm using Firefox. >> I'm using Firefox also, and have a pretty fast connection.
>> So, what does the tenth dimension look like, and what happened to the >> previious nine?
> It's a big dot, which apparently subsumes the first nine. If I'd had the > pateince to watch the whole thing, instead of skipping to the end to find > out whodunit, I might know more.
Here is how to watch the whole flash presentation without getting bored because of the slow download speed. I've got about 1.5 Mbps download rate--I can actually see that on internet speed download speed tests. It probably took 10-15 minutes for the entire presentation to completely download. I'm doubting that the presentation is 100 megabytes, so I presume there is some other bottleneck.
It takes a little while for the first page to load, but if everything goes well, you will see a little right-handed helix rotating about a line. If you click on the "0" end of the the line, the presentation begins.
Unless you were a teenager before MTV launched, you will find the wait too long to be worthwhile. But you can just keep your newsbrowser open and read a newsgroup until you start to hear Mr. Bryanton's voice. At that point switch to the browser window and watch. You will see an "episode" of the presentation--usually 1 dimension. When the "downloading assets" icon appears, flip back to the newsgroup and read some more.
I've watched it twice. It seems pretty wacky to me. You'll see some _Flatlander_ tropes, but also Brian Greene's ant from _Elegant Universe_. I'm fairly tolerant of flash presentations. This one struck me as not in the least objectionable. Actually it is as minimalist as one is likely to see--in flash.
To answer Gene's question: Basically you just go through the first 3 dimensions 3 times, at the end of each collapsing the entirety of that structure into a point and starting again. First time you have the entire lifetime of our universe, the second time all possible lifetimes of our universe, the third time all possible lifetimes of all universes--including those that start from different initial conditions from our own.
All in all, I find it a little haunting. Any physicists want to comment?
Phillip SanMiguel wrote: > All in all, I find it a little haunting. Any physicists want to comment?
Not an actual physicist, however I know that the ten/eleven/twenty-one dimensions of string theory give rise to few of the higher dimensional effects presented.
However, in as much as giving the ability to conceptualize higher dimensions the flash is great.
I just wish the intro didn't make it seem like the ideas presented had the backing of string theory. I know that this was supposed to be avoided, but several people I've shown the flash to thought that the presentation was an explaination of string theory itself, not just higher dimensions.
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