5 Responses:

1. Boris Magocsi says:

   6 years ago at 1:26 am

   I wonder if a person can start to develop an intuition for 4-D space by playing with something like this? Or by playing with the real-world equivalent (which doesn't exist)?

   • George Dorn says:

     6 years ago at 4:16 am

     It would probably help to have a VR version of this, so that instead a 3D environment projected onto a 2D screen, you can have a 3D environment you can see depth in and move around in.

     Of course, we don't see 3D, either, we see a pair of 2D projections on our retinas. That 2D character in the example? Can only see a 1D projection.

     Years ago I had a screen saver of a hypercube rotating regularly along the fourth axis (in addition to slowly tumbling along the first three). It took a lot of staring, but the regularity of the motion did give a weird intuitive sense of the entirety of the shape.

   • Cat Mara says:

     6 years ago at 2:01 pm

     That question forms the basis of a classic SF short story called "Mimsy Were The Borogoves" by Lewis Padgett which you can find in a lot of anthologies and which made it to the screen in seriously mangled form as "The Last Mimzy"

     • Boris Magocsi says:

       6 years ago at 11:46 pm

       I will check those out, thanks.

2. AoSeaMilk says:

   6 years ago at 6:36 am

   I need more of this! I can understand the concept but I can't predict how the items will interact like I could with the 3D example. It(I) need[s] an example with layered slices showing how the object moves through 4d space.