Thursday, June 19, 2008

:Three dimensional Painters example

I'll explain about dimensions with examples now.So three dimensions, seems to be the minimum for life. But just as one can think of two dimensional beings living on the surface of the Earth, so one could imagine that the three dimensional space in which we live, was the surface of a sphere, in another dimension that we don't see. If the sphere were very large, space would be nearly flat, and Euclidean geometry would be a very good approximation over small distances. But we would notice that Euclidean geometry broke down, over large distances. As an illustration of this, imagine a team of painters, adding paint to the surface of a large ball. As the thickness of the paint layer increased, the surface area would go up. If the ball were in a flat three-dimensional space, one could go on adding paint indefinitely, and the ball would get bigger and bigger. However, if the three-dimensional space, were really the surface of a sphere in another dimension, its volume would be large but finite. As one added more layers of paint, the ball would eventually fill half the space. After that, the painters would find that they were trapped in a region of ever decreasing size, and almost the whole of space, was occupied by the ball, and its layers of paint. So they would know that they were living in a curved space, and not a flat one.Understood huh??

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