29 Sep Extra Dimensions
How Many Dimensions Do We Live In ?
One of the most confusing, complex and debated question is how many dimensions do we live in ? At first, our common sense tells us that we live in 3 dimensional world as we perceive 3 dimensional things easily but is it some illusions ? Is there some extra dimension that is unknowingly being used to perceive 3 dimensional world ? how many dimensions are there exactly ?
Think about this for a moment, imagine you yourself as a single point and there’s nothing else other than that. As you being a single point, you won’t be able to see yourself ever and no one else could as there’s absolutely nothing else. Imagine there is a line and you are a point on that line. Whether you look to left or right, you would only see single point but never actually a whole line. That’s you being in single dimensional world.
Now, consider there’s a 2 dimensional plane and you as a point part of it. You won’t be able see yourself but from other points you could be seen. On higher level it won’t be possible for anyone being part of that 2 dimensional plane and seeing it completely. To see 2 dimensional plane viewer has to view it from outside of plane. Since, the plane is 2D, to see it completely you need to have a vision from 3rd dimension. For example, say there’s a piece of paper which has rectangle drawn on it. Stick that paper on the wall and try to see drawn rectangle from top view or side view. You always will see a line and not the whole rectangle. But if you see rectangle from front view you will see whole rectangle.
In short, in order to perceive 1 dimensional world, we need access to 2nd dimension and to see 2 dimensional world, we need access to 3rd dimension. So if you want to see nth dimension, you would need vision of n+1th dimension. As we know we can perceive 3 dimensional things, there has to be 4th dimension and this 4th dimension is time !
If you ask us how many dimensions do we live in ? our answer would be we live in 4 dimensional universe with 3 spatial and 1 temporal dimension. But how come time being a 4th dimension ? Imagine you are looking at car that is not moving. You can not be sure weather it is a 2D picture of car or a actual car unless it moves with reference to some point. Its a movement that allows us to infer that our world really does have 3-dimensions, we can move around and we see things moving in a way that clearly must be representative of a 3D world.
Now think about this: What is it that allows movement to be perceived in the first place? Of course, it is time, because movement doesn’t make sense to us without time. So, in a sense, we do experience a 3D world using our vision, but not directly a world with 3 spatial dimensions, instead we perceive directly a world with 2 spatial and 1 temporal dimension which allows us to infer the existence of the third spatial dimension.
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