Dimensionality

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We live in a space with three

different degrees of freedom for
movement. We can go to the left or
to the right. We can go forward or
backward. We can go up or we can
go down. We are allowed no more
options. Any movement we make
must be some combination of
these degrees of freedom.
Any point in our space can be
reached by combining the three
possible types of motion. Up /
down motions are hard for
humans. We are tied to the surface
of the Earth by gravity. Hence it is
not hard for us to walk along the
surface anywhere not obstructed
by objects, but we find it difficult
to soar upwards and then
downwards. Space is more 3-D for
a bird or a fish than it is for us.

Two dimensions requires only two
numbers to specify the location of any
point. There are two degrees of
freedom in 2-D.
Three dimensions requires three numbers to
specify the location of any point. There are three
degrees of freedom in 3-D. Note that the
direction outwards is represented by a slanted
line.

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Brief history of ideas on dimensionality.

Euclid: In the formulation of Euclidean geometry a fourth
dimension was not even considered.
Aristotle: He was the first person to state categorically that the
fourth dimension is impossible. In his work 'On Heaven' he wrote,
"The line has magnitude in one way, the plane in two ways, and the
solid in three ways, and beyond these there is no other magnitude
because the three are all."
Ptolemy:(A.D.150) In his book 'On Distance' Ptolemy gave a 'proof'
that the fourth dimension is impossible. Draw three mutually
perpendicular lines he suggested. Try to draw another line
perpendicular to all of these lines. It is impossible. The fourth
perpendicular line is "entirely without measure and without
definition." The fourth dimension is impossible. This is really not a
legitimate proof of the 4th dimension. It is merely a proof that we
cannot visualize the 4th dimension.
Riemann: On June 10, 1854 a new way of looking at geometry was
put forward in a famous lecture by the mathematician Bernhard
Riemann. He generalized Euclidean geometry to a non-Euclidean
geometry allowing for curved surfaces and any number of higher
dimensions.
Riemann's ideas started many people thinking about
higher dimensions. People found that the ramifications
of the existence of higher dimensions were astounding.
If you could manipulate the fourth or higher dimensions
you would have god-like powers.
You could walk in such a way that no wall
could stop you.

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You would appear to others to be passing
through walls or doors.
When hungry you could simply reach into the
refrigerator, without opening the door.
You could extract a section of an orange
without peeling it.
You could do surgery without cutting skin.
You could disappear and reappear at will.
You would be able to see people who
had been buried by an avalanche.
The standard method by which people try to understand higher
dimensions is to try to see how a lower-dimensional creature
would see a three-dimensional world. For this purpose 2-D worlds
are often used. Let us consider a 2-D world. To jail a criminal in
such a world a circular boundary would have to be placed around
the criminal. To extricate the criminal, all a 3-D creature has to do
is to peel him off the 2-D world, and redeposit him elsewhere on his
world. This feat, which is quite ordinary in 3-D, appears fantastic in
2-D. No one in the 2-D world understands what the up direction
means. The internal organs of a 2-D creature would be visible to
us. It would be trivial to reach inside a 2-D creature and perform
surgery without cutting the skin. Viewing this 2-D flatland, notice
that we are omnipotent. The 2-D creature cannot hide from us. He
would see us as having magical powers.
In the later part of the 1800's the idea of a fourth dimension
became very popular. In 1877, a scandalous trial in London gave
the idea of extra dimensions international notoriety. A magician
and psychic by the name of Henry Slade was arrested for
fraudulently using palmistry, etc, to deceive his clients. Prominent
physicists of the time came to Slade's defense claiming that his
psychic feats actually proved that he could summon spirits from
the fourth dimension. Detractors said that scientists, because they
are trained to trust their senses, are the worst possible people to
evaluate a magician. To objectively test a magician/psychic you
need another magician. They will know when any tricks are being
made.

Flatland

In 1884 a headmaster in London, named Edwin Abbott

(1838-1926) published a satirical novel called 'Flatland:
A Romance of Many dimensions.' This book works on
several levels outlined below.

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Flatland is a story that can interpreted several ways.

(1) It is a satire on the staid and heartless Victorian
society, a place filled with bigotry and suffocating
prejudice. "Irregulars" (cripples) are put to death,
women have no rights at all, and when the protagonist
in the story Mr. A. Square tries to teach his fellows
about the third dimension, he is imprisoned.
(2) It is a scientific work. By thinking about A. Square's
difficulties in understanding the third dimension, we
become better able to deal with our own problems with
the fourth
(3) At the deepest level, we can perhaps view Flatland
as Abbott's roundabout way to talk about some intense
spiritual experiences.
----------------------------------------------
Flatland is a plane inhabited by creatures that slide
about. The lower classes in Flatland are triangles with
only two sides equal.

The upper classes are objects with all equal sides. The
more sides one has in Flatland, the greater one's social
standing. The highest caste of all are objects which
have so many small equal sides that they are
indistinguishable from perfect circles. The pure circles
are the high priests. Women in Flatland are not even
skinny triangles, they are but lines, infinitely less
respected than the priestly circles. Discussion of the
third dimension in Flatland is strictly forbidden. Mr.
Square's life is disrupted one day by a 3-D creature
called Lord Sphere. Lord Sphere manifests himself as a

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circle in the 2-D world, that can magically change size.

Lord Sphere peels Mr. Square off the 2-D Flatland and
hurls him into 'spaceland.' Mr. Sphere only sees the
cross sections of 3-D objects. Things appear and
disappear and change shape rapidly. When Mr. Square
is returned to Flatland he tells others of his experience.
He is jailed and put into solitary confinement as
punishment for telling others that the third dimension
exists.

The years 1890 to 1910 may be thought of as

the golden years of the 4th dimension. Ideas
about higher dimensions permeated literary

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circles, the avant garde, and the thoughts of
the general public, affecting trends in art,
literature, and philosophy.
Some art historians have argued that the
fourth dimension crucially influenced the
development of Cubism and Expressionism
in the art world. In particular this took the
form of an artistic revolt against the laws of
perspective.
In the Middle Ages religious art was
distinctive for its deliberate lack of
perspective. These pictures were full of flat
people and flat surroundings. This art
reflected the church's view that God was
omnipotent and could therefore see all parts
of our world equally. There was no need for
perspective in God's view of things. Hence
according to the church art had to reflect
God's point of view. All paintings had to be
two dimensional.
Art of the Middle Ages: The Bayeux Tapestry

Renaissance art was a revolt against this restricted form

of art. Perspective in art began to be much more
popular.
Renaissance Art: Leonardo Da Vinci's painting 'The
Last Supper'

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Cubist art revolted against the restrictions
that perspective imposed. Picasso's art
shows a clear rejection of the perspective,
with women's faces viewed simultaneously
from several angles. Picasso's paintings
show multiple perspectives, as though they
were painted by someone from the 4th
dimension, able to see all perspectives
simultaneously.
Cubist Art: Picasso's painting 'Portrait of Dora Maar'

In Europe at the end of the 1800's talking about the 4th dimension
was the in thing at parties and other social gatherings. Eventually
the ideas of the fourth dimension crossed the Atlantic and came to
the United States. The main proponent of all things 4-dimensional

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was a colorful English mathematician named Charles Hinton.
Hinton spent his entire adult life obsessed with the notion of
popularizing and visualizing the fourth dimension. In 1885, he was
arrested for bigamy in England and put on trial. He was imprisoned
for three days. Shortly after that he left for Japan, eventually
ending up in the U.S. in 1893.
Hinton wanted there to be a name for going one way or the other in
the fourth dimension just like :
forward and backward
left and right
up and down
His corresponding made-up words for the fourth dimension was
ANA and KATA. If you were going in the ana direction in the fourth
dimension then you were going in the opposite direction from
someone going in the kata direction.
Hinton was also the person who thought up the name for the
4-dimensional hypercube. He called it the TESSERACT. This
hypercube is the generalization of the three-dimensional cube. All
of its sides must be of the same length.
There are three ways of visualizing the Tesseract.
(1) The unfolding analogy method.
(2) The method of looking at the shadow
in a lower dimension.
(3) The slicing method (i.e., use cross-sections).

Method 1 Suppose you have to make a model so that a Flatlander

can visualize what a 3-D cube looks like. One way of doing this is
to unfold the cube and stretch it out flat. The 2-D creature now will
at least be able to observe the sides of the full object and the 2-D
creature will be able to get some feeling of what it looks like when
it is folded back into it's usual 3-D shape. Note that when the 2-D
creature watches as the cube is folded up once again, she will see
in the end only one face still existing in her 2-D world

What would a unfolded hypercube look like stretched out in 3-D?

Instead of stretched out areas as there are in the diagram above
there should be stretched out volumes. Just as the areas above are
2-D squares, the volumes that would emerge with an unfolded
hypercube should be 3-D cubes. The unfolded 3-D representation
of a hypercube should look like the following object.

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The unfolded hypercube stretches

out to an arrangement of eight 3-D
cubes. Note that when folded back
again the hypercube leaves only one
cube left in our 3-D world.

This form of the hypercube projection has been made into kites as
shown below.

(Click to make bigger)

It has also shown up in art as in the painting by Salvador Dali as
shown below.

(Click to make bigger)

Method 2 Another way to show what the 3-D cube actually looks
like to a 2-D creature would be to shine a light on the object to see
how its shadow projects on a 2-D surface. The 2-D creature would
then try to infer from the shadow pattern what the 3-D object might
look like. Note that there are six bounded areas in the 2-D creatures
space coming from the 3-D object. This corresponds to the six
areas that were present in the unfolding case discussed above.

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What is the analogous situation for the hypercube? Above there

were 8 volumes. We expect that this should still be true this time.
There should be 8 bounded volumes in the 'shadow' projection of
the 4-D object to 3-D space.

Method 3 The last way to show what the 3-D cube actually looks
like to a 2-D creature would be to slice the 3-D cube up into areas
and give each slice to the 2-D creature to analyze. A slice of a 3-D
cube is just a square. A cube is many squares all compressed
together. Hence any cube can be decomposed into a sequence of
square slices.

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A slice of an hypercube is going to be a generalization of the slice

of the 3-D cube. The slices should be volumes instead of areas.
To draw the sliced version of the hypercube you
first draw two side by side cubes. Then connect
each corresponding point on each cube.

This design for the hypercube was first put forward by Claude
Bragdon in his 1913 book "A Primer of Higher Space." Bragdon
was an architect who incorporated this and other 4-D designs into
some of his buildings. The Chamber of Commerce Building in
Rochester , New York, is one of his buildings based on 4-D ideas.
For a animated hypercube click here: ROTATING HYPERCUBE.

A good link for the discussion of 4-D structures is

http://home.earthlink.net/~bprice/math.html

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Criticism of 4-D ideas

In retrospect, the ideas of Riemann put forward in 1854, were popularized to a
wide audience in the late 1800's and the early 1900's by mystics, philosophers
and artists. Our understanding of nature was not measurably increased by
these early attempts at analyzing higher dimensions as Riemann had hoped.
There was no attempt to use hyperspace to simplify
the laws of nature.
No attempt was made to use Riemann's mathematics
in an applied way. It became a branch of pure mathematics.
There was no experimental confirmation of the
4th dimension.
There was no good physical justification of
the 4th dimension; ghost stories weren't enough.
Within a few decades of the peak of interest in the extra 4th space dimension,
Einstein related time to the 4th dimension. This changed the way that people
viewed the 4th dimension.

Modern Resurgence of Interest

in Higher Dimensions
In physics the extra space dimension was to come back.
In 1919, Einstein received a letter from Theodor Kaluza.
The letter astounded him because Kaluza had
successfully generalized Einstein's theory of gravity to
five dimensions ( one time dimension plus 4 space
dimension). What amazed Einstein was that by adding
one extra space dimension Kaluza obtained, not only a
theory of gravity, but a theory of electromagnetism as
well. These ideas never received widespread attention
and fell by the wayside. In the 1980's, spurred on by a
desire to construct a theory of nature that could
incorporate all of the fundamental forces, physicists
resurrected the higher-dimensional ideas of Kaluza,
Einstein and others. Since then the theory of higher
dimensions has become a well respected tool for the
attempt to describe nature in a unified way. Today one
of the most respected attempts to describe all of the
fundamental forces in a unified theory is called the
Theory of Superstrings. This theory assumes that the
most fundamental entities are string-like bundles of
energy that all fundamental particles can be constructed
from. The standard superstring theory assumes that

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space has 9 spatial dimensions and that there is one
extra dimension for time. Six of the 9 extra dimensions
are curved up into a very small radius. This supposedly
happened very early in the evolution of the universe.
Hence, we now live in a 3-D universe.

Dimensions and Self-aware Subsystems

Arguments that the only life is 3-D life are common.
When the dimensionality of space is greater than three,
people have shown that if similar forms of
electromagnetism and gravity exist in the higher
dimensional world then atoms will not hold together.
The reasoning then goes that if atoms can't form, how
can living things that must be made from atoms exist?
Obviously they can't, so therefore there are no higher
dimensional lifeforms.
When the dimensionality of space is less than three
dimensions it has been argued that neurological
systems for any 2-D creatures would not be complex
enough. Nerves would cross in 2-D creatures, making
thought transmission very difficult. The computer
scientist A.K. Dewdney from the University of Western
Ontario has proposed that this objection can be gotten
around by the presence of switching nodes in the 2-D
brain. When a thought has to be transmitted it gets
switched through the crossed grid of neural paths just
as car traffic gets switched through intersections by
traffic lights. Another problem with 2-D creatures is that
digestion might be a problem. A digestive tract based
on a digestive tract that 3-D creatures have would result
in the 2-D creature being cut into two pieces.

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This objection to 2-D life, however, can easily be

countered. We can allow the 2-D creature to be
constructed like some flatworms, which have only one
opening in their digestive tracts. These creatures eat
food and expel wastes from the same opening.
Alternatively, the 2-D creatures can have a 'self-gripping
gut.' Each side of the digestive tube would have
interlocking projections. This zipper-like structure is
open at the mouth end when the creature eats. As the
food passes through the body, the zipper closes behind
the food and opens ahead of it. The body stays together
this way.

It is not clear whether any arguments we put forward about

different dimensional life are correct since they are somewhat
anthropocentric. Why should energy structures in disjoint
dimensionally different universes be the same? If they are not the
same, then any analysis that people have done to point out the
uniqueness of 3-D is flawed.

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