I saw this jargon around a month ago, and I tried to commit it to memory. Instead, I only committed its existence. Either that or I should be committed.
It’s nothing like projection or representation or anything common. I [think] I remember never having seen it before.
Got an example?
Representing a three dimensional object as two dimensional? (That would be projection.)
How is “lower” meant and what sort of “dimension” is intended?
Unless you’re thinking of something very different from what it sounds like, you’re talking about a projection.
Well, there are special names for certain types of projection from a higher-dimensional space into a lower-dimensional space. Such as the analemma, for example (not the solar equation-of-time curve, but rather the azimuthal orthographic projection). That’s a word you might well not have seen before.
I did a full text search of the OED for dimension or dimensions and patiently scanned the ~1000 results (they were nice enough to generate me one long list with snippets) and didn’t come across my word, so i’ll stick with projection.
I did come across “Brobdingnag,” "The name given by Swift in Gulliver’s Travels to an imaginary country where everything was on a gigantic scale. Hence used attrib. as: Of, or pertaining to, that country; of huge dimensions; immense; gigantic. "
Let’s not forget the 5th Dimension. Great vocal group. Hope they’re still around.
Robert Heinlein’s short story And He Built a Crooked House might have what you need. If not, it’s a fun read, anyway.
alterego, that’s what I’d call “scaling.” Scaling up or scaling down. The word dimensions was taken the other Dopers in its more technical, mathematical sense of the number of Cartesian axes used in a space. Your thread title might be less ambiguous this way: “to represent something on a lower scale.” That would be Lilliputia, to continue your example.
Was the word related to holography?
S’what I was thinking.
The only ways to represent something in a lower dimension I’ve heard of are the aforementioned “projection” and “unfolding” – just as a cube can be cut apart along edges and “unfolded” in two dimensions, so can a tesseract (for instance) be “unfolded” in 3-space.
Then there’s “intersection”, but that’s a whole different hypercan of worms.
Well, holography is sort of similar to the boundary properties of holomorphic or harmonic functions on complex domains. Recall Cauchy’s theorem: if f is holomorphic on domain U then for all w in the interior of U
f(w) = \frac{1}{2\pi i}\int_{\del U} \frac{f(z)}{z-w}dz
That is: one can recover the values of the function at interior points of U (a 2-dimensional manifold) from the values on the boundary (a 1-dimensional manifold).
Holography’s just like that. Only different.
Rendering?
I’ve heard 3D designers using the word rendering to describe making detailed drawings of proposed (or existing) designs. For example, if I wanted to design a new computer monitor, I’d make drawings of what it looks like from the front, back, side, top, and even bottom. They would probably be what I’d show the client to show what the thing will look like before moving on to a prototype. From what I’ve seen (which may be atypical) the renderings will be attractive looking, colored in, etc. There will be a more detailed plan with full specs sent to whoever is making the thing.
Another word that I’ve heard is “elevation.” Like if I designed a house, I would have detailed floor plans/blueprints, but I would also have “elevations” to show what it would actually look like when looked at straight on.
Way different, I’m thinkin’.
When I go in for a CAT scan they have to send x-rays through me, not just photograph my skin. And I’ve never been able to get information about the interior of anything I’ve made a hologram of, even if it did look 3D in a 2D medium.
Unless you’re a well-defined mathematical function, I think you’re going to need to encode that interior data somehow on a 2D or 1D form via a process that is essentially some “unfolding”.
Jake writes:
> Let’s not forget the 5th Dimension. Great vocal group. Hope they’re still around.
They’re not. In fact, one of them is dead. So if the remaining four attempt to sing “Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In”, what would be the technical term for that?
Cubism?
Quadrephrenia?
Who said anything about those little things? I’m talking about holography in the large, like the “holographic principle” in cosmology.