So I bet most of /sci/ has seen this already, but I've never seen anyone talk about it. What's YOUR take on it?
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Anonymous2008-11-22 20:05
it's metric space, lol
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Anonymous2008-11-22 20:09
It's a bit more than just standard metric space.
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Anonymous2008-11-22 20:17
no, "metric", get it
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Anonymous2008-11-22 20:19
There's nothing to get.
Anyway, I heard some scrub saying that universes branch at the 5th dimension, and not the 7th.
I don't quite understand why that would be the case?
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4tran2008-11-22 22:18
Time travel doesn't actually "need" a 5th dimension. 4 dimensional GR admits closed time like curves (Godel metric). However, it is possible to argue that our curved 4 dimensional manifold isn't "complete", but needs a 5th (or higher) embedding dimension. By such an argument though, we can say little about the higher dimensions, other than that our universe is a 4 dimensional submanifold.
For instance, the surface of the earth is a curved 2D manifold. If we embed this in flat 3D, then the earth is suddenly "flat" again (in the sense that it can be described by a flat metric).
Though thought provoking, his choice of when to compress the lower dimensions to a point is rather arbitrary. There is no reason that the set of all universes can't be spread out over 9000 dimensions.
ITT: People go on about how we can bend the 4th dimension, or the 5th or whatever and travel wherever, and do all their silly paper-pencil-hole metaphor analogy crap, but srsly, how the hell do you fags intend to actually bend 4 dimensions of universe, just the way you want them, in the 5th dimension, when you can barely glimpse the 4th? Huh? Tell me that anon!