[lit-ideas] Re: can you imagine 11 dimensions?
- From: palma@xxxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 20 Nov 2007 18:02:26 -0500 (EST)
this is utterly irrelvant since there is no requirement to imagine
objects at all.
Some reader may wonder what that means.
I provide an easy example. In classes taught (by me and others) often
there are people who belive, and quite firmly (they say they know this
to be true etc.) that there is a god, benevolent, in some cases even
some god that created them, etc.
Well it is an interesting exercise, at least as Gedanke experiment to
ask them to imagine what the universe woudl be like IF there were no
such entity. And they come with all sorts of interesting views.
Pointedly nobody I met actually thought it was an incoherent imagining
(i.e. there isn't a contradiction in a "god-less" universe.) Many
complain that it would be "meaningless", "empty", "devoid of moral
contents" and many different complaints are fielded.
However, what *did* they imagine? not god (by assumption) not any
particular object (it is not like imagining my shoe without heel.)
at best they (can be said to) imagine an entire world-situation.
Likewise for strings, there is no requirement to be able to form a
visual image of a string to think/imagine/theorise about strings.
On Tue,
20 Nov 2007, Paul Stone wrote:
> > the discussion goes nowhere until we understand what the question asks.
> > Consider: lots of people declare, and quite sincerely to be sure, to be
> > unable to imagine spaces with more than 4 dimensions.
> > None the less, we have spaces like that (in one theory called M or B, we
> > have 11 dimensions and there are lively debates: at least the first
> > conclusion to draw is that those people imagine [do they?] what's not
> > imaginable by (many) others
>
> The extra dimensions are not truly 'imagined' -- last time I looked,
> the word 'imagine' had the root "image" in it -- as in, form an image
> in one's mind of something.
>
> While these theories (string, super string, supersymmetry, m-field,
> etc) are _mathematically_ needing of more than four dimensions, no one
> can actually IMAGINE what the fifth and beyond is like. Nobody has
> every given me a decent description, either visually or literally of
> Calabi-Yau manifold.
>
> Nobody has every ACTUALLY explained the concept of what a single (or
> even non-dimensional) string really IS. It's all completely
> theoretical and based in math. The concepts behind the math are simply
> ideas of how to start the math, not real or imagined fully-formed
> conceptualized "things" -- thus not truly imagined. IN other words,
> while someone can 'accept' that there may be 11 dimensions and do the
> math to sort of support such a supposition, we can not, as humans,
> with our limited sensory input and our minds ever possibly imagine
> truly what those other dimensions are any more than we can truly
> imagine what god is.
>
> If you lived on a flat screen in two dimensions with no time, you
> simply would NOT be able to understand what four dimensions was. We
> are similarly limited. This is not to say something can't exist, but
> it is almost certainly, without truly revolutionizing our senses,
> impossible to ever apprehend.
>
> unconvinced that anyone is more imaginative than I,
> five
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