Explaining the Fourth Dimension for Beginners

[Beetle-jucie]

Okay how can someone explain the four dimension in so that someone like me can under stand them?

I'm asking this question because my math teacher will not talk about it so that the other students would not get confused. I get the theory (or how ever you want to say it)a little bit but i still don't get the whole picture.

So if you can explain it to me or send me to another website that I might be able to get it would be a huge help to me.

please and thank you

 

[belliott4488]

The basic idea is not difficult once you've mastered the idea of plotting points in two dimensions by using pairs of coordinates (x,y) and then points in three dimensions by triplets of coordinates (x,y,z). If you then imagine points in 4-D with coordinates given by (w,x,y,z), you're on your way.

There are plenty of good sites for understanding what it means to add a fourth dimension to three basic ones. These ones tend to focus on 4-D cubes, since that has been something of an interest for me, but they also give you a general idea of how to think in four dimensions:

http://www.math.union.edu/~dpvc/math/4D/welcome.html"
http://www.naturalmath.com/jokes/joke10.html"
http://www.geom.uiuc.edu/docs/forum/polytope/"

 

[CaptainQuasar]

Hopefully this isn't simply more confusing, but here's an illustration of a 3D section of a rotating 4D cube:

[PLAIN]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d7/8-cell.gif[RIGHT][SIZE="6"]⚛[/SIZE][/RIGHT][/URL]

 

[Beetle-jucie]

thanks, I'm starting to get it

 

[belliott4488]

Hopefully this isn't simply more confusing, but here's an illustration of a 3D section of a rotating 4D cube:

[PLAIN]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d7/8-cell.gif[RIGHT][SIZE="6"]⚛[/SIZE][/RIGHT][/QUOTE][/URL]

I love that image. I downloaded it a while back and now use it as an avatar elsewhere, but I've forgotten where I first saw it. Do you know who made it or where it comes from?

 

[CaptainQuasar]

It's from Wikipedia, I assume a contributor there created it because there are several different versions in the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesseract" article.

⚛​

 

[JANm]

The fourth dimension is as far I have experienced it the best expressed in Weather(forecasts). Not only the results of the calculations of huge computers, but also the modelling thing itself. As Richardson used his "human" computer in the beginning of the twentieth century (because electrical were not yet available); weather is there on many spatial points and on all time. So fourthdimensional it is, as such it is modeled and as such they use their formulas.