I'm working late today, preparing a lecture for Friday morning. It's on a cool subject, something called Hamilton's canonical equations. It's a funny game that takes place in a 6-dimensional space (so-called phase space).
The first 3 dimensions are the familiar world where we live.
Maybe we can use the other dimensions for something funny, like telepathy or getting in touch with the dead? Sorry, folks. You can't >:(
The first 3 dimensions describe where we are, and the last 3 dimensions describe how fast we're moving and in which direction. The 6-dimensional space is just a convenient way to represent our motion with mathematics. That's it.
Hamilton's equations are fundamental in both classical physics and quantum mechanics. In the quantum world of superstrings and such, there are other funny things coming into the theory as well. But still it's just a convenient way to describe physics in the language of mathematics.
Higher dimensions can't be used for anything exotic at all in our peaceful lives on Earth.
Sorry if you got disappointed, but I can tell you that theoretical physics is really cool >:)
(I found the picture of Sir William Rowan Hamilton (1805-1865) on Google Images. The photographer is probably dead long time ago, so I guess he doesn't mind if I use the photo. Sir William looks a little bit grumpy, doesn't he? Anyway, he was a really smart guy)
I hate to correct you, but the fourth dimension is for traveling really fast through time and space. I usually use it on Sundays so I can go back and start the weekend over.
ReplyDeleteHelen: Sorry, I forgot about your supernatural power >:D
ReplyDeleteSir William looks like he could use a little Milk of Mag.
ReplyDeleteYo Physics Teacher! Love the dimensions stuff! Science and math are so cool!
ReplyDeleteI was looking for quote to share at my next science meeting here are a few that I laughed at:
I know that this defies the law of gravity, but, you see, I never studied law. -Bugs Bunny
The more success the quantum theory has, the sillier it looks.-Albert Einstein to Heinrich Zangger (May 20, 1912)
Yoicks. The mind boggles. Well, my mind does. Husband would love this - he wanted to do physics but ended up choosing tax law.
ReplyDeleteJudy (South Africa)
This reminds me of a Tesseract. Not that I actually understand the concept.
ReplyDeleteABftS: Yes, might be that would cheer him up. Many of the genius scientists like Newton, Einstein, Dirac and Hamilton were kind of special personalities.
ReplyDeleteMer: Haha, funny quotes. Einstein never liked quantum mechanics. "God doesn't throw dice", and that kind of arguments.
Judy: I must admit I'm happy I chose physics before law.
Matthew. If you try to visualize 4 out of the 6 dimensions, it would be something like a Tesseract (4-D hypercube). We never do that kind of things. We often work with problems of many thousand dimensions, even infinite number of dimensions (in abstract spaces). The math is essentially the same as for our 3 dimensional world, but it's not practical to visualize more than 2-D or 3-D subspaces >:)
And here I thought the 4th dimension was the place my socks go to after i put them in the dryer, as I have about 30 socks with no match...
ReplyDeleteteehee-- there is a canonical analysis in statistics, too, but there aren't 6 dimensions involved (though it DOES use multiple independent AND dependent variables so that is something...
i think something just happened to my brain involving 6 dimensions. love this post and the comments, as well.
ReplyDeletePhysics--cool. :)
ReplyDeleteHart: Yes, we're using that kind of statistics too, sometimes with thousands of random variables (Bayesian inversion is part of the course I'm teaching now, but not this week). If you have 30 pairs of sock you can make a statistical distribution (which would make a 30-dimensional space), and compute the probability for each pair to be complete after your next laundry >:)
ReplyDeleteJill: The brain may get a little bit fuzzy if you try to picture all these dimensions, but it's really easy to handle. The math-rules are the same if it's 3 dimensions or 1000.
TGE: Yes, coolest there is (in addition to skiing, drumming, heavy metal, writing and ... >:D)
All I learned from physics when I took it in college was that lots of balls get dropped, and bounce, and shot from a gun... then I have to use math to explain that a ball just dropped, and bounced, or was shot from a gun.
ReplyDeleteNo lasers, nuclear weapons, black holes or anything else I wanted to learn about. I learned then that despite all the tossing of balls and firearms, it just wasn't for me.
Is it weird that I wished I liked it more?
Physicis was my weakest subject in school. I excel on biology. It helps my writing, I hope.
ReplyDeleteFire and Cross