What the matrix looks like: a chilling 4D view of the universe/multiverse

submitted by Vulptex from self.whatever

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[–]neolib 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

since we can't comprehend 4D

After playing 4D version of popular 2048 puzzle for a while you kinda feel you begin to comprehend it, try it

https://huonw.github.io/2048-4D/ (it's 2x2x2x2 hypercube)

Wikipedia entry for original version: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2048_(video_game)

[–]Vulptex[S] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

You could never envision what it looks like. The most you can do is compare how lower dimensional planes look to you, and how higher dimensional objects look as they intersect the 3D plane. For example a 4D sphere would look to us like a tiny sphere appearing and growing larger, before getting smaller and vanishing again. Compare this with how a 3D sphere looks passing through a 2D plane, it has the same effect creating a circle.

We do have models of 4D objects following this process, such as tesseracts and hyperspheres. But they are just clever hacks to represent all the extra sides in a 3D graphic.

[–]neolib 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Yeah, you don't visualize it, but you begin to feel (on gameplay level) which tiles would collide with others in all 8 4-dimensional directions, just like with 4 directions in original 2048 (up/down/left/right).

Apparently two new directions have fancy names ("ana and kata"):

Comparatively, four-dimensional space has an extra coordinate axis, orthogonal to the other three, which is usually labeled w. To describe the two additional cardinal directions, Charles Howard Hinton coined the terms ana and kata, from the Greek words meaning "up toward" and "down from", respectively.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-dimensional_space#Orthogonality_and_vocabulary