House of more than 4 dimensions

Feynmanfan

Dear friends,

I have a friend who studies architecture and has given this difficult task:

<<think of a house of more than 4 dimensions.A small house of 250m2 could act as an experimental probe into an architecture of more than four dimensions; the experiential phenomena of the house will be a crucial factor. The house should also be inhabitable. Materials, from molecular aspects to geometric properties will be important as will space and time. The house will act like a “thought experiment.”
In ‘The Elegant Universe,’ Brian Greene seeks to resolve the incompatibles of General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics through String Theory, requiring that we drastically change our understanding of space, matter, and time....>>

Do you have any ideas what this house should look like? Brian Greene describes curious phenomena at the Quantum cafe. Have you come up with any ideas

Thanks for your help

Tom McCurdy

I find that the easiest way to picture more dimensions requires adjusting the picture a little. I picture a rotating storage closet of space (each compartment being a seperate dimension) something that can rotate into our 3 dimensions but then disapeears from our dimenions into the forth. This rotating closet dimension analogy helps especially when trying to picture something with 11 dimensions. It is halfway between a viable picture and the math. For example to calculate the volume of something in four dimensions you would just take side 1 times side 2 times side 3 times side 4. Basically it all depends on the points... these locations in 3 dimension space that determine where something could be. the rotating close allows it just to be a 4th place the point could be.

Also if you are still having trouble try this other method of dimensional reduction. Picture a world of 2 dimensions, this is the world u live in. (don't pay attention to feasiablity here, the ability to consume food and later expel it would imply you be divided in half but for the examples sake ride with it) These 2 dimensions are your world, how would you possible know what 3 dimensions are like. You can move ur arms around and around and it just wouldn't make sense that there could be a 3rd dimension, you after all move your arms in a complete circle, yet u never enter the 3rd dimension being traped in a plane. Infact for you in this 2 dimensional world Imagining a 3rd dimension would be like us trying to imagine a fourth, it would not seem possible. However lets say you met a 3 d person when you were 2 dimensional, the person could show you the new way to move back and forth that creates the 3rd dimension. However with out that help it would be impossible. So now we have two options, a.) wait for a 4 dimensional being to come and help us visualize the fourth dimension, or b.) do what we can with what we have. Since I am impacient (and a bad speller) I choose b. So now lets implore a similar technique we used to examine why we couldn't visualize the fourth dimension. Lets try dimensional reduction. Lets visualize the 3 d world as a block, this block represents the 3d, and acts as a 2 d plane would, so now to create the 4th dim lets stack some more of thes 3d blocks on top of each other in essence creating the 4th dimension, the 4th compartment on the previous rotating storage closet.

-hope this helped with your house
tom