Why is it so hard to imagine 4D objects
In: Mathematics
Simply because we don’t experience it on a day-to-day basis.
It would not be dissimilar to trying to explain 3D to a 2D stick figure. Say there is a stick figure who lived his whole life on a piece of paper. He can go up, down, left, and right, but his world ceases to exist past the front and back of that piece of paper. Now try to explain a 3D object to him. If you could pass a 3D object through the paper, such as a pencil, he could see the “slice” of that pencil that is currently in the paper, but there is no way for him to actually see the whole pencil in 3 dimensions at once, and it would be very difficult for him to accurately imagine it, let alone explain it to someone else.
We are like that 2D stick figure trying to figure out the 3rd dimension. Since we are 3D and have never seen or experienced 4D, it’s very difficult to imagine it, and any representations we come up with of a 4D object are only in 3D, just like the 2D “slice” of a 3D pencil would be to a stick figure.
Latest Answers