Ko0K on 6/7/2006 at 03:28

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Good stuff. Could've used a less creepy narrator, but I've got to admit that animation beats the heck out of chalkboard drawings when it comes to visual aids.

descenterace on 6/7/2006 at 06:15

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That's exactly the point. For the strings to be able to vibrate in such a way as to behave as a given particle, the maths requires that they be able to move in eleven dimensions.



Same thing. The index of the dimension doesn't matter. There are 10 spatial dimensions and one temporal dimension; asking which one is 'first' doesn't actually make any sense.

Raven on 6/7/2006 at 10:55

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goodluck trying to verbalise all this. There is a REASON that mathematicians and physicists use mathematics and its notation. They are pretty much an international language, but only for those that know how to speak it… otherwise you just end up talking trash and trying to draw pretty artistic interprations while talking down to the viewer... and the viewer doesn't even realise that they are being talked down to.

Mortal Monkey on 6/7/2006 at 16:35

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The concept of more dimensions than the X, Y and Z in our universe is rather absurd, unless you redefine the term dimension. What X, Y and Z have in common is that they are all independent (IE you can't calculate the Y of everything, even in knowing its X and Z), and they can all be measured with the same length of a line.
Time is not the 4th dimension. While it is independent, it can not be measured with the length of a line. And even though you could argueably visualize time as a timeline which you could measure, you cannot say that one length in time always equals that length in X, Y or Z.
To put the final nail in the time capsule, if you firmly believe that time is one dimension, would it not be more logical for X, Y and Z to only be part of another dimension? While time is when, X, Y and Z are all part of where.

Mortal Monkey on 6/7/2006 at 17:46

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After finally getting that flash thingy to partially load, I can tell you it's a bunch of crap already from their explanation of the 3rd dimension.
For one, wrapping a two-dimensional universe around a 3rd dimension does not automajically make it a 3-dimensional universe. The flatlander still can't possibly digest, and still can only move in two independent directions. Thus the universe must still be 2-dimensional.
But the worst part is that the universe changes from potentially infinite in both dimensions, to infinite in one dimension while finite in the other (where it loops).This makes me conclude that the theory is just one horrid mess that holds no merit at all.

Another issue is that they totally forked up on the flatlander's vision. Whereas a human's vision can be described as a 2-dimensional plane with the added depth information that two eyes give us, a flatlander would only see a line with the added depth information two eyes would give him (one eye above the other).
If you imagine taking a vertical line 1 pixel wide from your monitor, and stretching this to either side to fit your entire screen, you'd get a good impression of what a flatlander picture would look like. Did you suddenly gain X-ray vision? I think not. Looking at really thin slices of something and being a flatlander are two quite seperate things.
Forgetting that we humans always view a 2-dimensional picture with our eye in the 3rd dimension is in itself so unforgiveably stupid that I won't even consider waiting for the rest of the flash movie to load.


Edit: Apparantly the fool's on me. If I'd actually read the preamble I'd have found out that this was supposed to be theoretic drivel.