Dimensions

[hoggy952]

We obviously live in three dimensional space (well 4 dimensions if you include time). But science thinks there are 10 or 11 dimensions! What on Earth (!) does that mean? Can we have a 5th dimension? There's talk of another universe less than a millimetre away from us that we have no perception of? Can anyone explain what these dimensions can be?

[patkins]

I`ll have a short bang at it. If you understand the alertness of animals, their sense of smell,hearing,vision etc. it is estimated that we,in the not too distant past possessed all of these more sensetive faculties which have become severely dulled by what the modern age has thrown at us, ie the media, work, schedules...all the modern tasks that have taken their toll by ,if you can understand in a kind of reverse situation,making life and living easier but at the same time occupying more of our time and in doing so , needing less and less of those senses. This hasn`t answered your question in any full sense but is an aspect part of a much bigger answer. Now , where did I put those pills.

[barrowmanandrew]

when you look at a road, it looks flat (2 dimensions), but if you look closer, then you will find dents and imperfections.
now imagine a wet road, water can take up space in these imperfections.
in the same sense space appears flat and constant, but like the road, it has imperfections (or so eggheads say).
likewise mass and energy can fill these imperfections.
this is what they mean by extra dimensions.
the extra dimensions they are talking about are tiny. but they are everywhere....
this is why they think gravity is so weak
because all the force leaks into extra dimensions...
i think ....:hmmmm::hmmmm::hmmmm:
multi universes are a diffrent concept.
apparently theres a simple experiment shining a light or laser through a piece of cardboard with slits , which proves the existance of parallel universes.
i remember doing it at school.
~~~~ knows how it works though.....:hmmmm::hmmmm:

[hoggy952]

for every choice a single person makes, another universe ( or universes if it's multiple choice ) is created where the oposite choice(s) are taken

it might be hugely different, ( like if hitlers Mom decided she had a headache that night, there'd be no rockets, no space travel etc.. ), or it might be miniscule such as you deciding to wear your silver striped tie instead of your plain navy blue one.

[barrowmanandrew]

its worse than than that , when you get down to quantum particles, they apperently can exist in two diffrent places at once
or weirder still, they can exist and not exist at the same time....
:hmmmm::hmmmm:
maybe nag3 won't be such a bad thing after all.
will stop me watching discovery channel when i'm drunk and frying ma brain......
:giveup::giveup::giveup:

[hoggy952]

if time travel were possible it would be impossible to change anything due to the knock-on effect.

To use the example of hitler, (I refuse to use a capital h), if someone went back in time and assassinated him in the late 30's early 40's then the course of the war would be different. Some people may die that didn't and some may live that didn't. This in turn would alter the structure of various families, maybe even yours. Would you have been born? Would you have an extra sister or brother? Would the time traveller have been born? If not then time travel may not have occured for another 200 years, in which case by altering the past the time traveller would be the cause of his own demise by not being born in the first place and consequently not been able to time travel.

[barrowmanandrew]

this is why most scientists now think it is possible only to travel into the future.
the faster you travel, the slower time runs (this can actually be measured and clocks on sattelites have to be adjusted to compensate)
so if you travel almost at the speed of light, time will almost stop for you, but carry on at same rate for everyone else.
you wont notice anything unusual until you stop as it will seem to "you" as time is running at normal rate.

as time has been passing faster for everyone else, when you stop, more time will have passed for everyone else and you will have travelled into the future.
the nearer to speed of light and the longer you sustain the speed will determine how far into the future you travel.
if anyone could travel at speed of light, then time would stand still (so they say)
therefore, if you could break it, time would run backwards and opposite effect would take place.
this would apppear to be the reason nothing can reach speed of light, because it doesn't make sense and can't happen...
i think... brain fried....:giveup::giveup::giveup:

[hoggy952]

so are you suggesting that time travel is a dimension? if so, are you suggesting it isn't possible? and then what about the other 6 dimensions?
Lets say there are 'other dimensions'.


I met my wife at a swimming baths one Sunday morning just over 37 years ago after a last minute decision to go with my mates. In the 'other dimension' I took the opposite decision and stayed at home.
Consequentially in the other dimension I never met my wife, never had 2 children by her and ultimately never had a total of 4 grandchildren.
Now, in the dimension where I met my wife a time traveller from the future has gone back to that Sunday morning. He decides that as we ran down the Pier Head landing stage to catch the ferry to New Brighton that I would trip up and sprain my ankle, therefore stopping me from catching the ferry and going to the baths and meeting my wife.
In the other dimension the opposite would have to happen, I would catch the ferry, meet my wife and have kids etc.
However, because of the changes in this dimension affecting me, they would also affect others such as my parents because they wouldn't have had the 2 grandchildren we gave them. This would lead to things that happened in their lives with our children not actually occuring in their lives because they did not do those things with those grand children.

Are you confused?

Because I bloody am!lol lol

[barrowmanandrew]

~~~~ me i am confused
i think your getting mixed up with multiiverse theory and extra dimensions.
other universes dont exist in our other dimensions
if they do exist (which is uncertain), they will have there own extra dimensions
they are supposed to co-exist with our universe, but you cant travel from one to the other...


i am saying time travel into past is not possible, but time travel to the future is possible(in my opinion)
for instance:
if there was a space ship that could accelerate to speed of light in 1 hour and decelerate to a stop in one hour.
let's say you went for a long journey, say 10 years at full speed.
in the first hour time would start travelling slower for you , the faster you get and it would appear to you that say about 45 mins would have passed before you reach speed of light.
for the next ten years , you would not notice any time passing as time has completly stopped for you at that speed, but not for everyone else
then ship starts decellelerating and you notice time passing again.
your watch would start moving again and show say another 45 mins before ship comes to a halt.
as far as you are concerned , you have only travelled for 90 minutes ish
but to everyone else , you have been gone for over a decade.
just rough figures but you get the picture....
hope i've got this right, just waiting on someone shootin me down in flames....
now i'm really confused....
:giveup::giveup::giveup:


clear as mud... :proud::proud::proud:

[z786]

maybe you understand better with this
Road to the Multiverse (http://www.zshare.net/videoplayer/player.php?SID=dl051&FID=66223492&FN=qfn-fg801.flv&iframewidth=648&iframeheight=415&width=640&height=370&H=6622349210ac8d59)

[hoggy952]

time travel DOES exist.. you're doing it right now.. you are traveling into the future, albeit at the leisirely pace of 1 day/day

time travel to the PAST cannot exist for the grandfather paradox reason stated..
although who's to say that altering anything would change anything in this universe? it would just create a parallel universe as making any decision does..


other dimensions are needed to explain string theory, where stuff we see isn't actually there. it's made up of sub atomic particles that we see but which are only part of a string that passes through several other dimensions and may even then re-appear in ours somewhere else as part of something else..

they proved this by splitting some sub atomic particle in 2 and taking the 2 halves a long way from each other..
they then manipulated one half and the other half did the same thing despite being a long way apart.

or some cobblers like that..

[barrowmanandrew]

other dimensions are also needed to explain "the weak gravitational force"
i have tried my level best to understand string theory, but i just cant get my head round it.
it basically says all sub atomic particles are actually 1dimensional vibrating strings of energy...
:giveup::giveup::giveup:
i downloaded an audiobook called "George Musser - The Complete Idiots Guide to String Theory (http://www.demonoid.com/files/details/1967553/16448445/)"
i could understand short bits of it, but never quite got my head round it
u should give it a go...

[flyingpig]

In senior school we had the most amazing professor to teach physics and he had a great way of explaining things and a way to explain how the universe has many dimensions, I can remember this one.... (BTW it was an ordinary comprehensive in Liverpool)

If 2 people are travellin in the same direction. Person a is travelling at three quarters of the speed of light, and Person B is travelling at a quarter of the speed of light. You would ordinarily presume that the actual speed of light between the two people would be proportional to the speed they are travelling. But however the spee of light between the 2 people would still be at the constant speed of light.

Here it is in MPH (assume the speed of light is 1 mph)
Speed of light = 1
Person A - 0.75 the speed of light
Person B - 0.25 the speed of light

The speed of light between then should be 0.5 mph - proportional to the speed they are travelling. The actual speed of light between person a and b is still 1. Therefore proving the light, time and space are all linked but somehow curved and existing in 2 places at the same time.

Hope I have sort of got that across.

[barrowmanandrew]

In senior school we had the most amazing professor to teach physics and he had a great way of explaining things and a way to explain how the universe has many dimensions, I can remember this one.... (BTW it was an ordinary comprehensive in Liverpool)

If 2 people are travellin in the same direction. Person a is travelling at three quarters of the speed of light, and Person B is travelling at a quarter of the speed of light. You would ordinarily presume that the actual speed of light between the two people would be proportional to the speed they are travelling. But however the spee of light between the 2 people would still be at the constant speed of light.

Here it is in MPH (assume the speed of light is 1 mph)
Speed of light = 1
Person A - 0.75 the speed of light
Person B - 0.25 the speed of light

The speed of light between then should be 0.5 mph - proportional to the speed they are travelling. The actual speed of light between person a and b is still 1. Therefore proving the light, time and space are all linked but somehow curved and existing in 2 places at the same time.

Hope I have sort of got that across.
we never had teachers like that in my school...
but, yes thats right
the speed of light is constant no matter what.
which means (as strange as this may sound), time is not constant...

[chroma]

we never had teachers like that in my school...
but, yes thats right
the speed of light is constant no matter what.
which means (as strange as this may sound), time is not constant...

Time isnt constant its been known for years that its linked with space (hence the name spacetime) and it varies depending on the curvature of spacetime, curvature is directly influenced with mass, things with more mass curve spacetime more than things with little to no mass.
Another large and important thing thats linked with mass and spacetime curviature is Gravity.

The less gravitational force then the less spacetime is curved, therefore time would move slower.

As a for instance:

Get two identical computers running at 1mhz and have them add up by one every clock cycle.
Now run them both at exactly the same time and you'll notice that after a second they count from 0 to 1,000,000, after two seconds they hit two million and so on.

now take one of those computers and blast it into geostationary orbit and you'll notice that the one on the ground can hit a million in a second while the one in orbit will top out at around 999,987

Time moves slower because theres less curviature of spacetime!

Theres not much of a difference but in terms of syncing with GPS or satellite gear it has profound implications and programmers need to write very carefully timed software or else things go badly wrong.

The really crazy part is that if you take your ground computer into a shuttle and fly with it up to meet the other computer and run the test again they'll both hit a million in a second! simply because your observing the results with the same curviature imposed on yourself and the gear, times still moving slower but your perception of a second alters with the spacetime curve.

More headbusting still is that if your running the simulation endlessly on a probe thats heading out of the solar system and comparing it with identical gear on earth it will wind up wildly inaccurate because the probe will flow through space with several changes in gravity, meaning at one moment a second will run faster than a second on earth. Which is why if you wanted to sync with a probe you would need to work out all the mass surrounding its path and write custom software that accounts for the gravitational changes around it. This is without taking into account its velocity which also has an impact on how time works.

So yeah time is very much an elastic relative term, a second on earth is faster than a second on the moon, both of which are much slower than a second on the sun.

As for dumensions, theres a flash here Visualizing up to ten dimensions - Boing Boing (http://boingboing.net/2009/08/18/visualizing-up-to-te.html) that explains it far better than i could.

[flyingpig]

we never had teachers like that in my school...
but, yes thats right
the speed of light is constant no matter what.
which means (as strange as this may sound), time is not constant...

Yeah, he was great, he was a professor at Oxford and gave it up to come back to Liverpool to teach at a our school.

He was great. He could explain things dead good, we used to all be riveted in his class.

[barrowmanandrew]

Yeah, he was great, he was a professor at Oxford and gave it up to come back to Liverpool to teach at a our school.

He was great. He could explain things dead good, we used to all be riveted in his class.
lucky git!
my physic teacher was a religious nutcase.
he spent 4 years trying convince us that god exists!!!
and his proof???

everything contracts as it gets colder , except water which starts expanding at 4 degree's
this means ice floats and top layers of water freeze first protecting water underneath.
his arguement is
if this didnt happen, water would freeze from bottom up, killing all life in the sea during iceage.
quite an unusual approach from a physics teacher....

[faum72]

i love this subject and the reason being there is no true answer, mind is time and is subjective too the individual up too a point, on a mass scale it defiantly amounts too an answer but never the true answer as it's truly subjective, we individuality create it ( dual being the operative word ) on a microscopic level we know that under the energy and of our eye quarks disappear and re appear, i reckon we create our own time and time space in this dimension and the next, consistently every moment in this reality and the next simultaneously...too add too the chat about light, I reckon we are travelling right now at the speed of light and this is why when go at a speed and reach it time stops, (yeah sounds crazy) but were almost doing the opposite too what we think were doing, achieving the speed we are already travelling at too stop it, speeding up too slow down time, light exists because because were keeping up with, if we stopped would it still exist??.....
and i think all things are hapening at once, but or mind, chooses too channel in too the right signal....

[hoggy952]

i love this subject and the reason being there is no true answer, mind is time and is subjective too the individual up too a point, on a mass scale it defiantly amounts too an answer but never the true answer as it's truly subjective, we individuality create it ( dual being the operative word ) on a microscopic level we know that under the energy and of our eye quarks disappear and re appear, i reckon we create our own time and time space in this dimension and the next, consistently every moment in this reality and the next simultaneously...too add too the chat about light, I reckon we are travelling right now at the speed of light and this is why when go at a speed and reach it time stops, (yeah sounds crazy) but were almost doing the opposite too what we think were doing, achieving the speed we are already travelling at too stop it, speeding up too slow down time, light exists because because were keeping up with, if we stopped would it still exist??.....
and i think all things are hapening at once, but or mind, chooses too channel in too the right signal....
Nice one! Hurt my Brain! If a tree falls in Brazil, and nobody hears it, does it still make a noise?

[chroma]

Nice one! Hurt my Brain! If a tree falls in Brazil, and nobody hears it, does it still make a noise?

If a fat chick falls in the middle of the forest do the trees laugh?