Saul Luizaga <sau### [at] netscapenet> wrote:
> I find it to be the most frustrating and fascinating thing ever. I did a
> search for its objects:

Yes, me too. Fascinating because I have a kind of feeling that it's sort of
real; frustrating, because I can't imagine it.
Over the past months I've read some stuff about it. But sometimes only part of
the books, because I often didn't succeed in understanding the examples (I have
a very bad understanding of all mathemetical related things), let alone
imagining it.
There are many interesting resources on the topic. I assume you already know the
Pov-Ray generated films:
http://www.dimensions-math.org/Dim_E.htm
I found them very intriguing, though too difficult to understand sometimes.

Apart from the classic novel Flatland there seem to have been written quite a
lot of books and essays on the topic between 1880 and about 1925, maybe because
the topic was inspiring to those day's broader interest in mysticism and
theosophy, e.g. Ouspensky's Tertium Organum and some essays by Rudolf Steiner.

I thought the books by "amateur-mathematician" Charles Howard Hinton most
interesting, because I got the impression that he really was capable of imagine
a little of the 4th dimension, at least in so far as it can be imagined.
Some of his books can be downloaded for free, e.g.:
http://www.archive.org/details/fourthdimension00hintarch

He developed a set of coloured cubes (that could be bought along with his books
at that time) which were supposed to facilitate the imagination of the hypercube
in his book "The fourth dimension":
http://www.greylodge.org/occultreview/glor_011/hintoncubes.pdf

I haven't tried yet to make these models, because I was too lazy and thought
maybe it wouldn't help and I would possibly be more frustrated than before. When
reading through part of "The fourth dimension" I noticed however, that there
would be no chance to understand it properly without models. I also thought of
recreating them in POV too, but it seems to be an awful lot of work.

However Hinton's approach to visualizing the 4th dimension is supposed to have
had a strong influence on Alicia Boole Stott, too, who herself had no formal
education in mathematics either but managed to get a honorary doctorate in 1914
because of her work on four dimensional polytopes. She made lots of beautiful
cardboard models and one gets the impression that she too was capable of
"imagining" at least some sort of 4th dimension.

Regards,

Simone



> http://search.viewpoint.com/pl/websearch?vb=2&tn=&type=ONE&k=4th+dimension+objects
>
> I don't know if some day would be possible but would be great to visit a
> 4D world and meet 4D people :-D
>
> I was thinking and maybe this is where you go when you die and ghosts
> are just what we can see from a 4D person. 4D makes my head go thinking
> pretty bizarre stuff, don't you?
>
> Cheers.

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