Raise your hand if you like science!

[Celtic Minstrel]

Originally Posted By: Sporefrog

So there is evidence that supports the idea. Actual alien encounters on Earth, however, have no credible evidence whatsoever.

And that's assuming that Earthlike planets are the only ones capable of supporting life, right?

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity

More importantly the video fails catastrophically to count dimensions properly, and on this point it goes kablooey already at dimension 5. It tells us that adding one more dimension past four allows us to represent all possible alternate timelines of the universe. But that would mean that there was only a single slider control for the history of the universe — only one single parameter that could possibly, for all time, be different. That's an utterly absurd underestimate. I mean, if I flip the little spinner in the game of Twister, and imagine all the alternative points at which the pointer could have come to rest, I've already imagined one more dimension worth of alternate universes. But a heckuva lot more than that could in principle change quite independently of how my spinner might have landed.

As far as we can tell now, at least, the space of possibly different initial conditions of the universe is infinite dimensional. Maybe even uncountably infinite. So what this video counts as the fifth dimension should actually be dimensions 5 through infinity.

Hm. Perhaps this is just stupid, but I never really saw it as a literal branch – more like a set of parallel timelines that, up 'til that moment in time, were absolutely identical.

Even if you consider their reasoning valid, it doesn't actually manage to get up to dimension 10 – they get stuck at dimension 9. Personally, I don't think it's necessary to be able to visualize all 10 dimensions. Couldn't there be some dimensions that are mostly "unused"? As in, unnoticeable on macroscopic scales.

Again, I could be completely off base, but I like to think of it as being stuck to an n-dimensional brane, so we can't really imagine higher dimensions than n very well.

Originally Posted By: Master1

Doesn't a hypercube represent the fourth dimension?

Yes, it does. But I would presume that applies when the fourth dimension is added in the distance formula rather than subtracted. (I don't recall the technical terms for this.)

Originally Posted By: upon mars

I'd like to say that sciences are like philosophy;

Well, they are. In fact, historically at least, they are a subset of philosophy.



Oh, and about the technology vs science thing... I generally consider science to be the theories and laws and stuff, while technology is the stuff we create by applying these laws.

[Student of Trinity]

Originally Posted By: Celtic Minstrel

Even if you consider their reasoning valid, it doesn't actually manage to get up to dimension 10 – they get stuck at dimension 9. Personally, I don't think it's necessary to be able to visualize all 10 dimensions. Couldn't there be some dimensions that are mostly "unused"? As in, unnoticeable on macroscopic scales.

True, that — the video just kind of fluffs its way from 'there cannot be a tenth dimension because nine is everything imaginable' to 'ten is string theory'. But you're right, the normal party line is that all six extra dimensions are unnoticeable on macroscopic scales, being 'compactified' somewhere around the Planck scale. (Like a long cardboard tube: strictly speaking it's a two-dimensional surface, but on any length scale much longer than its two-inch-or-so diameter, it's effectively one-dimensional. It's second dimension is compactified out of sight.)