I cannot imagine how to fly a plane, but I can know that someone can fly a plane.
The Flatland story’s message is roughly like this:
You can imagine yourself walking past a 2D canvas without touching it. And from that you extrapolate “If there was another spatial dimension, a whole planet would fit ‘next’ to us without touching us at all.”
Any closed room, your insides, the content of any safe, would be an open book seen from there. We don’t know how that looks, only that some 4D being would theoretically see through us.
A locked room would be as silly to a 4D being, as drawing a closed rectangle around something to hide it would be ridiculous for us.
Or you can imagine a flatlander who can only see what is exactly on the surface of a lake: You stick your hand into that lake and the flatlander sees your five fingers intersecting with the water surface. It would say “Are you one of those five ovals?” Then your palm intersects the surface. “You five guys just turned into one oblong guy?!? And now you’re a big circle?!” - It’s all just your hand and arm. You can understand that cross-sections of a 3D object can have many 2D shapes, depending on the viewing angle.
Similarly, I don’t know how 4D things look. But I can know that they would look like something fluctuating that changes its shape, splits apart, merges, appears, disappears.
In mathematics, that’s the purely abstract concept of a dimension, though. When you get to physicists, the matter is heavily debated, and it’s looking less and less well for the proponents, since string theory is still not even testable after about 50 years of work spent on it. It’s difficult to even call it a theory. It’s a flexible mathematical model that can be mapped to a lot of stuff after you figured out how it works, but it can’t predict anything. And the Higgs Boson wasn’t helpful either…
Well, yes… the problem is, that interpretation would already constitute a hypothesis. What we can observe is “it behaves like matter, except it doesn’t interact with photons”. Hence, the observation is called “Dark Matter”. It’s about the best you can get without starting to interpret (i.e. theorize) what it actually is a whole lot. It could still turn out to be something completely unrelated to matter, yes. But as long as it behaves as much as matter as it does, and there’s nothing else to go on, it seems sensible to assume that it is “matter-like” as a default assumption that doesn’t require a comprehensive theory to even start talking about it.
Someone made a 4D minecraft, it’s really weird because we can’t see things in the fourth dimension until they move into the 3 dimensions we can see:
You might also like this book, which I read when I was a kid, about a girl and boy who discover how to move in the fourth dimension (directions they call ana and kata, instead of up-down, left-right, forward-backward) and end up trapped in higher dimensions at the mercy of higher dimensional beings and have to find a way back. It’s called “The Boy Who Reversed Himself”
Besides looking like an early 2000’s computer screensaver, this image is important because each streak represents an individual light spectrum of a galaxy or star. Euclid has a device known as a “grism” that can basically split cosmic light into a full spectrum of wavelengths before sending the data to NISP.
With this process, scientists can determine how far away a certain galaxy is, for instance, as well as what the galaxy is chemically made of.
“We’ve seen simulated images, we’ve seen laboratory test images,” William Gillard, NISP instrument scientist, said in the statement. “It’s still hard for me to grasp these images are now the real universe. So detailed, just amazing.”
So it’s a fancy 2-factor authentication. I do have to wonder what they’re after, exactly. I’m not one to suspect secret agendas (beyond the one to get filthy rich, but that’s hardly secret) behind everything, but it does seem odd that they’re paying people to sign up. 50 Bucks is quite a bit of money in many places of the world, considering the median global wage per day is still below 10 dollars (note median, not average. Averages are unreliable with the kind of mad outliers we have in the data…).
So… what the hell do they want that data for? What can you do with a couple terrabytes of scanned irises?
The further I read the more unethical it all starts sounding XD
“I think they very much leaned into this dystopian, cyberpunk design to get headlines, and frankly it’s worked pretty well,”
Or probably because it is just kinda dystopian from every conceivable angle. Especially preying on people living under difficult circumstances with the offer of a small monetary gain to see them through the month.
Also I’ve already thought of a few dozen ways to trick or hack this secure system.
Iris scanning has been regarded as a pretty secure identification method for a long time. I was first aware of experimental versions back in the 1960s.
The only use I can think of for a large database of authenticated scans is to define the limits of statistical accuracy the system is capable of. If you know what these systems can detect, it follows that you also know what they can’t. And armed with that information, you can create reliable, reproducible, fakes.
Of course, it could also be a bit of flummery to promote their crypto product. The volunteers are not being paid in hard cash - they’re being paid in a cryptocurrency that only has value if participants choose to give it value - and there’s no guarantee that anyone will.
My alarm bells went off stridently when I read the post so I didn’t bother reading the article. Now I’m going to take the time to parse those alarms --see what is really bothering me about it. :`P
I’m really not sure. You’d expect a simulation to run on more causal principles that are easier to control and less resource intensive. The problem with the dual-slit observation is that you can’t consider it a bug. It’s kind of a fundamental behaviour in the lower layers of reality that may be extremely weird, but is perfectly consistent. But if the whole probability fuzziness were built into a simulation it would make things difficult to control, difficult to debug, take a lot of effort to implement and would on top of that waste a whole lot of CPU cycles for… what exactly?
You could say that, in a way, it makes the universe more stateless. And don’t get me wrong, I love stateless and functional programming, and I’m using it a lot, but this isn’t one of the use-cases you’d want it for. Not if you don’t want things to slow down by orders of magnitude.
Everything is energy. There is, at the heart, no solid matter. At the sub-atomic level, what appear to be particles turn out to be energy organised in a particular way.
Everything around us, all of existence, is just packets of energy obeying specific rules. That’s what reality is.
Compare that to our crude simulations, in which we organise energy (electricity) to create the semblance of real-world objects and events.
Ultimately, the difference between a simulation and reality is just the level of detail. Beyond a certain level of sophistication, it becomes impossible to tell a simulation from the real thing.
Whether or not our reality is a simulation makes absolutely no difference to us - and provided the simulation is sufficiently detailed, we will never know. It’s a circular and self-defeating argument.
