The Immaculate Construction
While doing some research earlier this week for a presentation (on Face Recognition using Eigenfaces), I ended up following a strange sequence of links and found this:
It's a painting by Dali, called Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus). What I found really interesting is that the 'crucifix' in the image is actually the 'net' of a hypercube (ie, the 4-D analog of the cube, also called a tesseract). It's incredibly difficult (well, for me atleast), to think of things beyond three dimensions - but I got to reading more on this strange construct, and it's really quite interesting. It's quite beyond me to explain it without confusing everyone (me included) - but here's a simple way to think about it - a square has two perpendicular edges at each vertex, cube has three - and a tesseract has four. It's not easy to imagine, but this this might help.
As is usually the case when talking about dimensions, the discussion veered off into the realm of 'time'. My roommate (a physics/astronomy student) informed me that at the subatomic scale, almost all physical processes have a time-symmetry - equations are the same irrespective of the direction of time. A Wiki-fied analogy:
"If time were perfectly symmetric then it would be possible to watch a movie taken of real events and everything that happens in the movie would seem realistic whether it was played forwards or backwards. For example, a movie showing a cup falling off a table seems realistic when run forwards, but seems unrealistic if run backwards.
On the other hand, a movie of the planets orbiting the sun would look equally realistic run forwards or backwards; either way the orbital motions would appear to conform to physical laws."
More information can be found here.
Of course, after this heavy discussion, we sat and watched Jackass (never was a show more aptly named), which served to restore order to the universe, and caused the IQ in the room to quickly drop to zero.
It's a painting by Dali, called Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus). What I found really interesting is that the 'crucifix' in the image is actually the 'net' of a hypercube (ie, the 4-D analog of the cube, also called a tesseract). It's incredibly difficult (well, for me atleast), to think of things beyond three dimensions - but I got to reading more on this strange construct, and it's really quite interesting. It's quite beyond me to explain it without confusing everyone (me included) - but here's a simple way to think about it - a square has two perpendicular edges at each vertex, cube has three - and a tesseract has four. It's not easy to imagine, but this this might help.
As is usually the case when talking about dimensions, the discussion veered off into the realm of 'time'. My roommate (a physics/astronomy student) informed me that at the subatomic scale, almost all physical processes have a time-symmetry - equations are the same irrespective of the direction of time. A Wiki-fied analogy:
"If time were perfectly symmetric then it would be possible to watch a movie taken of real events and everything that happens in the movie would seem realistic whether it was played forwards or backwards. For example, a movie showing a cup falling off a table seems realistic when run forwards, but seems unrealistic if run backwards.
On the other hand, a movie of the planets orbiting the sun would look equally realistic run forwards or backwards; either way the orbital motions would appear to conform to physical laws."
More information can be found here.
Of course, after this heavy discussion, we sat and watched Jackass (never was a show more aptly named), which served to restore order to the universe, and caused the IQ in the room to quickly drop to zero.