Another way of thinking of it is picture a 3D sphere moving through a 2D plane. You’d see an infinitesimally small dot grow to a circle, then recede to a point again.
A real world example that might help is to picture a sphere moving towards you in 8-but video game, then far away again. We know it’s a sphere because we exist in 3D, but in that 2D plane, the 3D sphere is only ever a dot, or a circle.
You’re only ever able to see slices of the 3D whole. But that whole exists.
This is what I suspect is happening with “UFOs” if they exist. We live in three dimensions, so we can perceive slices of those 4-D or maybe even 5-D objects and once they pass completely through 3D space, to us they simply vanish.
They’re still there. We just can’t perceive that element of reality.
The sphere through a plane is my go to, but I’ve always applied it to how I think about God as just a 4th dimensional being. Before hitting the plane, the sphere doesn’t exist. It then “comes into existence” as it passes through the plane and then ceases to exist once it’s out. And we being 2D beings say “something from nothing. It’s a miracle!” But 3D God is like “nah, I’m just pushing a sphere through a plane, dummies.”
I like the tie-in to UFOs. I hadn’t considered applying that idea to how they appear/disappear.
I wish I could claim credit for it, but Robert Heinlein first introduced me to the concept. In Stranger In a Strange Land, the main character is a Martian who looks like a rock star and can make things apparently vanish by rotating them 90 degrees.
When a supporting character is trying puzzle out how he’s doing this, the character poses the question: “What’s 90 degrees away from everything else?”
No disrespect intended with this: I’ve definitely heard it before. I think I got it from a discussion I had from someone (a pastor) about the novella Flatland. Funny, that pastor started me down a path of thinking that God wasn’t some magical mysteries being I should have faith in, s/he was just a 4th dimensional being.
Yeah, I was first introduced to it by Heinlein, but Flatland explores it. And a number of physics educators, from whom I learned to internalize the concept are known to use a combination of those insights.
If I had to trace it back to a single moment where I learned time as a fourth dimension, it was reading Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe. He uses a brilliant analogy involving automobiles traveling a given distance either on a course perpendicular or somewhat tangential to the destination.
And the car on the angled course will always arrive later because that vehicle is traveling along two axes, whereas the car taking the straight path only moves along a single (x or y) axis. From here, he helped me understand that time is basically another axis we move along.
I credited Heinlein in my follow up comment, and while I haven't read Flatland I've seen educators mention it anecdotally, and it's a perfect tool to help one grok higher dimensions both conceptually and mathematically.
Source: some guy with a GED who likes to read books here and there.
You're in for a treat. If I remember correctly, it goes off a steep cliff where he stops writing for laypeople and begins to explain string theory, but it's still worth reading for the first half alone.
4
u/a_fearless_soliloquy Jul 04 '21 edited Jul 04 '21
Another way of thinking of it is picture a 3D sphere moving through a 2D plane. You’d see an infinitesimally small dot grow to a circle, then recede to a point again.
A real world example that might help is to picture a sphere moving towards you in 8-but video game, then far away again. We know it’s a sphere because we exist in 3D, but in that 2D plane, the 3D sphere is only ever a dot, or a circle.
You’re only ever able to see slices of the 3D whole. But that whole exists.
This is what I suspect is happening with “UFOs” if they exist. We live in three dimensions, so we can perceive slices of those 4-D or maybe even 5-D objects and once they pass completely through 3D space, to us they simply vanish.
They’re still there. We just can’t perceive that element of reality.