On Thu, 2004-04-15 at 07:52, Jim Muth wrote:
We appear to be forever doomed, trapped in a world of three dimensions, while able to know of the far greater vistas that would lie before us if only we could rewire our minds.
Since our minds are not about to be rewired, it's best we turn to today's image.
A side note: Some interesting musings about this occur in some of Greg Egan's (excellent) science fiction novels - "Diaspora" and "Schildt's Ladder" in particular. Egan envisages a world of artificial intelligences who *do* have the ability to modify their minds and senses to understand different kinds of space directly: "My earliest memories are of CP^4 - that's a Kahler manifold that locally looks like a vector space with four complex dimensions, though the global topology's quite different. But I didn't really grow up there; I was moved around a lot when I was young, to keep my perceptions flexible. I only used to spend time in anything remotely like this" -- he motioned at the surrounding, more-or-less Eudlidean space-- "for certain special kinds of physics problems..." In the meantime I suppose we'll all have to stick with squinting at fractals ;-) Regards, -- Edwin