So i recently saw how a cube would look like in 4 dimensions (Tesseract) but how do we know what it looks like if we live in a 3 dimensional world?
In: 2
It’s impossible for us to know what a four dimensional object looks like because we can only perceive three dimensions.
Think about how you can have a projection of a 3D object onto a 2D plane. Similarly, we can predict what the projection of a 4D object would look like in a 3D space.
A Terrasect is just a 3d representation of what 4 dimensions would look like. The 3d cube exists in all radius pointing out to the outer cube in the 4 dimension.
This isn’t the best example, but an easier representation might be to use time as a forth dimension. Imagine yourself standing exactly where you are and waving. If you existed in the forth dimension (time in this instance) you would be standing there in that same location waving for all moments in time past, present, and future.
This is probably not to the point, but we don’t even “see” in 3 dimensions. Our eyes are not capable of producing 3 dimensional images – light falls on a 2D surface of the retina in our eyes. Our eye has no ability to extract 3D information objectively from this light.
Our brain processes the 2D image from our eyes and essentially creates a perception of 3 dimensional world. Essentially all “looking” is a recreation of the brain.
So we essentially cannot say what a 4D object “looks” like because the human understanding of vision is all created by our brains and we have no wiring in our brains to process a 4D object visually. The best we do is process parts of it and try to interpret.
That’s the fun part: we don’t.
What we can do, however, is project a 4D shape down to 3D (like tracing the shadow of a 3D object gives us what it looks like in 2D) and step through the 4th dimension to get an animation of what it may kinda sorta look like.
[Here’s a video that explains what I mean](https://youtu.be/C6kn6nXMWF0).
Latest Answers