time for “deep thoughts on a saturday night.” a game social losers like me like to play. oh, by the way, happy norwegian constitution day!! it’s may 17th!! something else only social losers like myself would know. but only if they used to live in ballard, along the parade route.
my cousin scott recently adopted a new cat. his cat, gracie, died after a long life. she was 17. scott said that he did not want to get a kitten, as they are always adopted out, they are so cute. he wanted a CAT. a cat that had been in the shelter for a while. maybe one that was always passed over for the cute little kittens? he adopted a 14 pound black cat, which he named sofie. apparently she has a variety of meows. one of which is a siamese type.
the reason i bring this up.. i was talking to my cousins about our cats. i mentioned that pru hunts invisible bugs on the wall. scott said oh no… they aren’t invisible, cats see in four dimensions. which made sense to me at the time, i have no idea why. later… probably while trying to fall asleep, i said FOUR dimensions? hang on there… isn’t the fourth dimension time? to the best of my knowledge, scott was neither high nor drunk. maybe i misunderstood him. but i decided to look it up anyway. turns out, cats can discern movement at a much faster rate than humans, even when there is very little. which is why they like to watch tv. they are fascinated by it. but they don’t see the fourth dimension.
because the 4th dimension is fucking hard to understand!! it’s a freakin’ tesseract people!! like in a wrinkle in time? you want a visual representation of the 4th dimension, in your 3d world? you have to be able to cross one i at a time to see it. luckily, i can do this. think of it this way, we have 3 ways to move in space right now. forward/backward. left/right. up/down. each of these directions are perpendicular to each other. no one direction is made of of any other directions. you can go forward and back all you want, and you won’t be going left or right as well. you can’t. sooo… the 4th direction would have to somehow be perpendicular to the 3 directions we already know. right? got it?
ok, i can’t really visualize it either. and i had to read about 8 different web pages to understand it. the visualization of the 4th dimension is called the hypercube. and this pageis the best explanation i could find. i plagiarized it in the paragraph above.
you want to have more fun with the fourth dimension, go read Flatland by edwin a. abbot. the whole thing is online. makes your brain bigger. give a whirl.