No slight intended there Spectre, sorry for coming across as such.
Well, but, he does say this:
-FrL-
Simple. You just visualize n dimensions, and then let n = 5. Yes, I know it’s often told as a joke, but personally, it’s the method which works best for me.
And in my most lucid moments, I’ve occasionally been able to visualize 5 dimensions directly, but those are very rare. Still, I can’t rule out the possibility that there’s some savant out there who really can directly visualize the Calabi-Yau manifolds.
On the trustworthiness of the creator of that animation, I think it’s too harsh to call him a scammer. It looks to me to have all the earmarks of classic crackpotism. In other words, he really thinks he’s on to something, and just wants to share it with the world.
I second Chronos. It’s crap, and I’ve been saying so since the first time it made the rounds last year.
What’s so hard about Calabi-Yau manifolds? They’re just three-dimensional.
Wow, i consider my self no more than a moderately-well-read layman in the area of theoretical physics, but even I could see right through that.
The image of the ant crawling on a newspaper that is curled in the third dimension was never presented to me before as a way to understand the third dimension as an entitiy itself, but rather as a 2d-into-3d-model of understanding the possible curvature of the universe, where travelling in a straight line would eventually get you right back to where you started.
Is such a model of the universe still current, or did recent observations nix that one?
And a related question:
The Flash presentation included a notion derived from the Flatlander’s experience with the sphere. As the sphere passed through Flatland, the square percieved only a one-dimensional projection of its 2-dimensional cross-section, which changed its appearance as the sphere passed.
Noticing how we change our 3-dimensional appearance over time, a number of people, including the creator of the Flash movie on that site, have presented the idea that our changing three-dimenstional self is simply a three-dimensional “cross-section” of a four-dimensional entity, moving through our three-dimensional world along a “time axis”.
However, does Einstein’s discovery of the passage of time being unique to different reference frames destroy such a notion? I’ve never been clear on that.
I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again: IMHO the test that determines whether a hypothesis is valid or not is simply this: does it lead to testable predictions? It is irrelevant how ‘weird’ or ‘unconventional’ it may be.
If the hypothesis leads to predictions that are not testable, it’s religion. If it doesn’t lead to predictons at all, it’s opinion. If it leads to testable predictions, and those predictions test out negatively, it’s wrong. And if it leads to testable predictions, and those predictions test out affirmatively, that the rest of science bloody well has to adapt to it.
Now, the understandability, clarity, internal rigour, etc, of the arguments presented may influence the testability, but ultimately, it’s the effects in the real world that rule.
Does this guy’s website lead to any testable predictions?
I’m glad to hear that the link isn’t talking about superstring theory. Still, I’m not thrilled to learn that the 6 “hidden” dimensions are proposed because they’re necessary to make the math work. That’s exactly the sort of thing I was talking about when I complained about fitting the universe to your theory.
No, they’re compatible in a way. What GR says is that there’s no canonical way of chopping spacetime up into “spacelike” 3-D slices. Different observers chop it up differently, but all different ways are just as good as each other.
Think of it this way. A. Sphere can fall through the flat plane of flatland, cutting out a circle growing and shrinking. But what if flatland wasn’t a plane? What if it was a crumpled bedsheet? Then the cross-sections of A. Sphere wouldn’t be circles, but rather some odd irregular curves. Different ways of slicing up 3-D space into 2-D surfaces look different, but we can reconstruct the same 3-D space from them.
Well, there are many who are highly dissatisfied with string theory as it stands. Peter Woit runs a weblog called Not Even Wrong, and I just made a post last week titled Fundamentalist Physics on mine.
Don’t worry, there are others in the Resistance.
“Laugh a-while you a-can, monkey boy!”
The thing with the string model (note: not a theory, despite the common misnomer) is, it’s absolutely pathetic. The only reason anyone pays it any heed is that everything else is even more pathetic. There’s got to be something which governs quantum gravitational interactions, and until we get some of that precious experimental testing, the string model is the best we’ve got.
I dunno. They’re still pretty complex.
This single answer is, to me, worth the price of admission. Thanks.
I can’t get the flash version of the site to work right now (but I watched it last time this was posted – and I want those five minutes of my life back!), but in the text version, that “preamble” appears at the very bottom of the page. (Apparently, the author also doesn’t know the meaning of the prefix “pre”.) The fact that multiple people have posted on the straight dope asking, in essence, whether this has anything to do with legitimate science suggests he’s not doing nearly enough to convey that it doesn’t. (Of course, if he started with a big banner that said “THIS IS UNSCIENTIFIC NONSENSE”, he probably wouldn’t sell as many books.) I’d say he’s deliberately misleading people, while doing just the minimal amount to keep from getting sued.
I haven’t read the specific books mentions – I have to wonder if he has – but if he has read them, and if they taught him anything about extra dimensions, it certainly doesn’t seem to have influenced his writing on the subject. I’m not sure whether learning things only to utterly disregard them is better or worse than remaining willfully ignorant, but the guy’s not going to be on my Christmas list at any rate.
Salton is my “academic grandfather”: my advisor’s advisor. Variations on the n-dimensional term space you describe are used to this day in search engines like Google.
/hijack
There is reality; the world (Universe, room, space or MyTermToSayReality) you, me and the rest live in; and there are mathematical models trying to explain, describe or predict events in this reality. In only one of these ‘worlds’ does the ‘4th dimension’ (or nth) make any sense.
Try not to confuse them.