Mmmm it’s curious, I was pretty sure there must be twelve or thirteen… 
James Clerk Maxwell summoned a demon, now known (not surprisingly) as Maxwell’s Demon. Maxwell’s Demon violated the second law of thermodynamics, wreaking havoc throughout the universe, until it was comprehensively exorcised by Werner Heisenberg, Norbert Wiener and Claude Shannon, amongst others.
By proxy.
I’ve always conceptualized dimensions as co-ordinates. The position of any object can be described by an x, y, z (say, longitude, latitude, and altitude/depth) and time coordinates. This presupposes that two objects cannot exist in the same exact place at the same exact time.
I’ve never asked a physicist or mathematician, but is this and accurate way to conceptualize the idea?
They’re not proofs of alternate realities, but more like suggestions. A lot of spooky fiction has been about extra dimensions–that unfinished novel about extra time dimensions by C. S. Lewis was pretty interesting, what was it called?..
In short: the total number of variables needed to accurately describe a system is its dimension. The word is frequently used to refer to geometric dimensions, but it can also refer to the “degrees of freedom” of a mathematical model; making an visual representation of such a model requires a geometric space with that number of dimensions.
The notion of dimension as “alternate universe”, as described in this thread, has nothing to do with the various mathematical notions of dimension (the most basic of which is basically what TVAA said).
There is a connection between the ideas, but it’s often misunderstood. Let’s suppose that instead of the customary x, y, z, and t dimensions, we have w, x, y, z, and t dimensions. Then we could say that our “world” is the set of all points with arbitrary x, y, z, and t, but with w set at, say, zero. But that leaves plenty of room for worlds with w = 1, or w = 17, or w = 987123562. Now, if we posit some way to travel in the w direction, then creatures from those other worlds could travel to ours. But it’s incorrect to say that a creature from the w = 1 world is “from the Fifth Dimension”: His world is no more “the” world of the Fifth Dimension than is the w = 17 world, and the various other worlds would be just as removed from each other as any of them is removed from us.
A much better term for such alternate worlds might be other “planes”. One still needs to make the conceptual jump from 2-d planes to 3 or 4-d ones, but this at least gives the notion of parallel constructs “stacked” in some hypothetical other dimension.
And, of course, no matter how one describes them, there’s no evidence for the existance of any sort of “alternate world”.
And if you want to use virgins to summon mathematicians, by the way, sacrificing them is exactly the wrong way to go about it. I prefer my virgins live, thankyouverymuch.
Don’t sacrifice a virgin; I will come if you just fix me up with one. Or a non-virgin for that matter.
Ah there is so much confusion over dimension, but I suspect it was used in the sense of another universe by the OP. And as such, who knows? We obviously don’t know everything (well, I don’t, anyway), so it is really impossible to say whether there are other universes or whether it might be possible to open a door to them. But if it is, why have we seen no visitors from those other universes?
The implication was the ghosts and demons were the visitors from other universes 
I know a little about parrallel worlds and alternate dimensions and stuff but considered it no more than speculation. To hear it confirmed from “the horses mouth” made me wonder if there was something mathemiticians and physicists knew that the general public didn’t.
Thanks for the replies.
And Zoe I enjoy nothing more than opening my mind to new concepts and experiences.
I found it disturbing but, as this post shows, wanted to learn more about it.
Your friend wasn’t talking about dimensions, he was speaking of demon-shins. Totally different concepts. The former is mathematics, the latter metaphysiology.
As stated before, there are four dimensions that we**positively ** know about. If you susbscribe to Occam’s Razor that’s gonna about do it.
As to alternate universes…just a great concept dreamed up by some fantasy or Sci-Fi writer many moons ago. No basis in fact whatsoever.
Careful manipulation of mathematical equations “proves” the Earth is hollow but we know that ain’t right.
“Careful manipulation of mathematical equations “proves” the Earth is hollow but we know that ain’t right”
I would be very interested to see such manipulations.
Just a guess, but it may be a reference to Cyrus Teed’s hollow earth theory, in which we’re already living inside the hollow earth.
It uses the mapping:
[symbol]q[/symbol]’ = [symbol]q[/symbol]
[symbol]f[/symbol]’ = [symbol]f[/symbol]
r’ = R[sup]2[/sup]/r,
where R is the earth’s radius. That is, map the outside of a sphere to the inside.
Midwinter writes:
> To hear it confirmed from “the horses mouth” made me wonder
> if there was something mathemiticians and physicists knew
> that the general public didn’t.
You did not “hear it confirmed.” Your friend was speaking nonsense (and maybe he was just pulling your leg). There is no evidence from current physics or mathematics about the existence of alternate universes.
I suppose if we invaded flatland, we could legitimately be described as ‘the creatures from the fourth dimension’ so we could imagine ‘creatures from the fifth dimesnion’ similarly. There was even a bad science fiction series about it. But I don’t think many people mean this.
BTW, The Elegant Universe is on tonight Tues Nov. 4, 2003 on PBS. It might mention something about this.
The last one went into a bit of detail about the additional dimensions but I thought it was a bit too simplistic. They showed a graphic that looked like an x-mas bow. It gave the impression that a new dimension is just another method to describe something 3 dimensionally, like latitude and longitude describe something. You can describe something with latitude and longitude on a sphere of a certain radius. That would be kind of like 3 extra dimensions. You can also describe that point with x,y, and z. But if you try to plot the point you wouldn’t use x,y,z AND lat,lon, rad. I think the extra dimensions require ALL 11 points to give an accurate representation of the point. This is why we have such a hard time conceptualizing the idea of 11 dimensions. We only need 4 to understand a point. Extra numbes in there only confuse us.