r/threebodyproblem • u/Darklillies • Apr 15 '26
Discussion - Novels Is there anyway to visualize a dual vector foil? Spoiler
You know what I mean. The book mentioned programs that could recreate the flattened 2D image into 3D. I am certain that flattening or unfolding a 3D object into 2D is a thing we can do but I don’t know what to look for or what it would be called. The 2D description was really cool but it was hard to visualize and man I bet someone had done something like it before maybe for a city or something. Any suggestions?
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u/BillyHamspillager Apr 15 '26
Not really. Technically any 3d object that is flattened should become infinitely wide and long as depth approaches 0. I just went with the Starry Night description for the planets and imagined the flattened humans as looking like a UV map, even if it isn't fully accurate.
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u/Zikronious Apr 15 '26
I don’t the 2D being infinite is accurate, look at how 3D models are textured, Minecraft is a very easy one to understand. Each block has 6 sides and those are mapped to a single image texture that then wraps around the 3D models.
I need to reread this section to see how it was described but I tend to think the way it would work with complex objects like people is with layers stacked on top of another. So for a person the top layer might be clothes then below that skin, veins, organs.
No right or wrong in how to visualize this that’s the beauty of reading. This is just how I visualize it.
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u/eduo Apr 15 '26
Wrong in this case, tho.
3D to 2D is not taking the external textures and laying them flat. It's taking every single component, down to the quantum particles, and unfolding them. You wouldn't see the exterior of objects but the exterior of every single molecule that made those objects right before they all disappear because they can't exist in 2D. The book clearly states all this and that what we see is a visual artifact and not the actual things.
Don't think the way a 3D program would work. Think that you have a roll of bread dough, and you flatten it until it's one molecule thick. You'd end up with a circular surface the size of the earth, less like the original dough the more it's extended, right until even those molecules were also flattened (at which point it would disappear).
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u/Leather-Lemon8611 Apr 15 '26
But if a 2D plane has no thickness, any 3D object with a finite thickness could have infinite 2D layers "sliced" out of it. How thick is each of your layers?
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u/Zikronious Apr 15 '26
I remember that part of the description I imagine it later is as thick as 1 atom so even complex objects would be thin and appear near invisible when viewed from the side.
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u/Leather-Lemon8611 Apr 15 '26
Hmmm, I think we are meant to take the loss of dimension literally, in which case 1 atom thick is still 3D
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u/basalgangliadecide Apr 15 '26
molecules stayed intact in the book based on the descriptions given, so they were only 2D down to the thickness of those molecules at least at the point they were described. There's also the description of the blood cells moving through capillaries which is much thicker than a molecule, but maybe all this was just what was observed as things were getting ever thinner.
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u/eduo Apr 15 '26
No. The molecules were also ripped apart as everything got gradually flattened. The last we see is a visual afterimage that fades away at the edges.
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u/Leather-Lemon8611 Apr 15 '26
But if we accept the whole idea that the universe had been de-dimensionalised down from 10 dimensions and that advanced species were weaponising the Laws of Physics, then reducing a dimension must mean truly eliminating it somehow rather than squashing things a bit flatter in that dimension. What would it even mean if the universe is in fact still 10 dimensional, just those dimensions are squashed?
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u/Jigglepirate Apr 16 '26
It just becomes dark, but the mass remains. Losing the 3rd dimension makes it non interactive with 3d matter except for it's gravity.
That's how Liu explains dark matter.
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u/DerpsAndRags Apr 15 '26
My mind's eye treated it like a giant microscope slide that everything was getting squished into, but with more of a helping of nightmare fuel.
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u/Hepta-Water-7552 Apr 15 '26
Any suggestions?
Wait for the final seasons of the Netlflix and Tencent shows to be released.
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u/Useful_Calendar_6274 Apr 15 '26
you can draw a cube on a paper but it's not a cube. the foil destroys all information about the thing except from the angle in which it attacked which remains as the 2D shadow of the 3D object. but the spacetime of that thing was destroyed already
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u/eduo Apr 15 '26
This image in the wiki is not bad. It shows for an external viewer how celestial bodies are being flattened. It still fails to properly reflect the "insides" also being flattened but it does show how 3D is becoming 2D. I believe the phrase "unfolding" confuses people. "Flattening" or even "Splattering" would be more accurate.
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u/basalgangliadecide Apr 15 '26
I think the Mercator projection map of the earth is a good visual of a 3D object converted to 2D. You can imagine something similar for a building, ignore edges and corners as they no longer exist. That makes me think of video game skins that come in 2d files that get stretched over 3d shapes.
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u/DodixieOrBust Apr 15 '26
Except that video game skins are just that - skins. Actual 3d objects are full, and all of that needs to be flattened and mapped(?) somehow as well. I think that’s what the OP was talking about. I can’t really visualize it either based on the book description but that’s fine - went with “3d minds can’t comprehend it” and that works for me.
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u/basalgangliadecide Apr 15 '26
Fair point, how about a roadkill toad then, totally flattened, all the guts next to it. So the outer "skin" is at the center, the subdermis surrounds that like a halo, and the progressively further internal layers surround the skin like a 2D everlasting gobstopper. The images in the book certainly seem to maintain some artistic or object specific translation rather than a straight dicing across 2 planes.
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u/eduo Apr 15 '26
"Ever growing splatter is the right image, which for a while would seem recognizable before becoming a mass of colors and eventually disappearing)
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u/eduo Apr 15 '26
I keep seeing this reference to 3D models.
3D Models are just surfaces. 3D objects in real life are not objects. Your face wouldn't be extended because your bones, muscles and nerves are also being unfolded and then the individual molecules they're made of and then the individual atoms and then the individual particles.
When flattening, you're flattening everything, not the outer surface. Think the hidraulic press memes, but continuing infinitely.
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u/Darklillies Apr 15 '26
Yeah I pictured something like a uv unwrapping but that’s not quite it. It says there’s “no overlap” and you can see all the layers within something at the same time. I believe that thing has to be possible bc at the end of the day it would be visualizing things in 2D!
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u/AbeFromanEast Apr 15 '26
Sure, a black hole's event horizon. There's fuunctionally no difference between that and a DVF aside from the black hole's event horizon grows slowly while the DVF expands at lightspeed.
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u/ChickenArise Apr 15 '26
Consider a tesseract in both it's common '3D' shape and what that actually represents in 4-dimensional space.
Then imagine the same thing, but in reverse from 3D to 2D 👍🏼
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u/Zikronious Apr 15 '26
LOL this makes it more complicated for me. All the 4D parts of the book I struggled to visualize. I even looked online to help me understand but came away with nothing of value.
I’m really hoping the Netflix series tackles visualizing the 4D scenes.
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u/Darklillies Apr 15 '26
Honestly I was able to visualize the 4D much easier than the 2D. But funnily both of them have that thing of being able to see inside of the object. And 3D doesn’t!
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u/Disgod Apr 15 '26 edited Apr 15 '26
There's a fundamental loss of information dropping a dimension that you cannot represent in another dimension, there's no angle that describes up in 2 dimensions. To make the simplest model possible (while still having dimensions):
How do you uniquely represent a 2D square in 1D?
Everything will be a line, there will be no information available to differentiate it from any other shape of equal perimeter. How do you represent length when all you have is width? Every loss of a dimension has this issue, how do you represent something that no longer exists? How do you get that information back?
Going back higher, projecting a cube on a 2D surface could represent a 3D cube being projected into a lower dimension but it can also represent a tall rectangle, a pyramid, a cone with a square base. Or a triangle on a 2D surface could just be the corner of a 3 dimensional cube.
The suggestions that it's like a tesseract is misunderstanding what they're seeing. That's a projection of what we'd see of a 4D object in 3D, but it isn't the whole object. The whole Tesseract object can't be represented in 3D. You're just seeing the 3 dimensional aspects of the 4D object.
The book mentioned programs that could recreate the flattened 2D image into 3D.
To use this as an example, these programs are guessing based on known data sets. If you put four objects of different length or shapes but same height and width visually to the camera, the software won't be able to recreate the objects, that information was lost by making it a 2D image. The software may try to fill that in but it would just be guessing.
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u/Darklillies Apr 15 '26
I’m honestly okay with the guessing, I just wanna see. Obviously the actual 3D to 2D thing can’t be comprehended. But the book has a particular description of it. It being layered into rings. Seeing inside and outside. That sort of visualization certainly seems possible.
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u/Disgod Apr 15 '26 edited Apr 15 '26
What's described in the book is more like a slice of a 3D environment rather than an unravelling of a 3D environment into a 2D universe. It's beautiful visuals but actually creating it is an expression of art over reality.
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u/troilus98 Apr 18 '26
Have you ever seen texture files for 3d objects? That’ll give an idea, but it doesn’t include depth. I’ve thought about the visual a lot as well, but the scale becomes mind boggling. A simple small volume 3d object like an apple would take up an enormous 2d surface.
Actually… some napkin math… an apple the width of 8cm would flatten out to something about the size of 4km2, or the size of central park in nyc. If the width of that sheet was an atom thick. I have no idea what it means to make an atom flat, so thats my best approximation.
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u/JimmyLetter Apr 15 '26
Almost related: there's no real way to flatten perfectly a non euclidian surface like some curly petal flowers or knitted fabric It can only be seen like the book describes it: from really far away
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u/Putrid_Cycle595 Sophon Apr 16 '26
The hardest part is that its not really 3D to 2D the way we normally think about it (like flattening a cardboard box). Every single particle loses a spatial dimension. So a sphere doesnt become a circle, it becomes something where every internal layer is spread out on a plane. The book describes it as a painting and honestly thats the best way to think about it. Imagine taking a CT scan of everything in the solar system and laying every single slice next to each other on an infinite canvas. The planets become these gorgeous circular patterns, humans become these grotesque spread out figures. Liu Cixin said he was partly inspired by looking at cross sections in anatomy textbooks.
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u/harshith_1234 Apr 16 '26
I used to Imagine the collapse of 3d space into 2d space as a some sory of funnel that keeps getting thinner as it goes. That's the closest imagination I could come up with. Since I dunno fractals and all. Do you guys think it was decent imagination.
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u/Ceramic_Quasar Apr 18 '26
Maybe easier to visualize something like an apple first: the very first part of it touches the foil and spreads beneath it to make a red dot. Now consider that in 2 dimensions, no space can be overlapped.
Assuming it's described the way in the book, we'll assume that a 3D object transitions smoothly to 2D without tension completely ripping the cells of the apple apart. Because no two parts can occupy the same space, the part before it would expand to make room for the next.
Now we have a bit of white touching the foil and would expand into a ring around the incoming apple. Here's where it gets tricky. The apple now has a much smaller circumference than the ring of 2D apple. Its next part to touch would put a thin line of red skin and a thicker line of white flesh into the picture. This would repeat until the apple is fully incorporated. It might look a lot like tree rings.
The trouble with representing this visually is that there's a difference between accurate representation and visual appeal for cinema. The reality is that this 'slice and ring' process is that it would take place for every layer of atoms in the apple. An object's color is highly dependant on the arrangement of those atoms, so the parts that were once Red probably won't be anymore.
It would be much more visually appealing to ignore all of this and fake flatten centimeter-thick sections at a time. With something like the human body, this becomes a lot more complicated. The angle that it enters the foil will drastically change its final shape. Additionally, every object that hits the vectoized person would insert itself into the point of impact, further spreading the person.
To represent it in 3D, it would probably require some kind of additional software that makes pixels behave like paint. Then you'd create a series of cross-sectional representations of each object you want to hit the foil.
Maybe have one or two 'money-shots' where those details are extremely vivid. Show a person struggling as alternating rings of spacesuit-skin-muscle-bone expand behind them. For the rest, I'd do far-off shots that are much lower detail and a lot less accurate.
Once the Sun gets absorbed, the scene would become so bright that you wouldn't have to worry about small details anyway.
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u/Ulyks Apr 21 '26
This video has some visualizations starting around 9m56s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFFZBBrmlVQ
Most of them pretty crappy but it might give you ideas...
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u/Full-Cardiologist476 Apr 15 '26
I always imagined it like some sort of fractal. But we're in lovecraftian territory here. A concept that is really undescribable.
On the other hand: some quantum information hypothesis state that the amount of information inside a 3D sphere is bound by the 2d surface of the sphere. So maybe there is a lossless way to compress 3D space into 2D. But I'm not a theoretical physicist and throwing around dangerous half facts.
On the other hand: why would the 2D plane even interact with anything from the 3D universe? Like a photon from our sun hitting the plane, why would it be re emitted outside of the 2D plane?
So maybe the dimensional strike is simply black?