Wednesday, July 11, 2007

MultiDimensional Confusion

I just watched / read some content over at the Tenth Dimension (and his little blog, too). interesting stuff; i'm a pretty open minded sort of guy when it comes to philosophy, physics. I run into all sorts of nitpicks though, mostly with the larger physics community in general (and i acknowledge that the solutions to these nits may be found in actually educating myself better on these topics).

the one i had with this guy, and with physics in general -- a "dimension" is a variation in some property, that you're choosing to take note of and possibly (if you're labeling it with an ordinal bigger than '1') plot against some other dimension. where do They get off talking about "The fifth dimension", "The sixth dimension"? for the first three dimensions, there's a level of historical consensus that makes it plausible to talk about them as if they're proper nouns, but when you get into the foggy depths of string theory and tenth dimensional positions, it really isn't (to me) so clear what property gets to occupy those positions. and this guy seems to be describing certain dimensions as aggregates of the previous dimensions, by definition, which i don't get.

1 comment:

Rob Bryanton said...

That's a great point! Different parts of science use the term "dimension" in different ways. So, when Brian Greene says things like "each dimension gives us an additional degree of freedom", that is what the Imagining the Tenth Dimension model is proposing as well. I'd be fun to do a live chat with you about this some time: Imagining the Tenth Dimension now has a live chat meebo room where once a day people can talk to me as the creator of the "Imagining the Tenth dimension" animation and project. There's code in my blog for anyone to be able to put this room on their own site as well: all I'm looking for is an open discussion of ideas, and I fully support anyone who says their ideas differ with mine.

I look forward to chatting more about your ideas on cosmology, quantum mechanics, and so on.