different dimensions?

Question

today, i have heard that there is a fourth dimension and that what we process when someone is talking to us, they have actually said it five minutes ago, basically some sort of lag...does anyone know more about this?

Answer 1

It takes sound time to travel from someone's mouth to your ear. Haven't you ever seen lightning and not heard it for a while? There's a lag.

Now it turns out that even light has a finite speed, and hence a lag. The sunlight that lights you up came from the sun 7-8 minutes ago. Starlight can be many years in the coming. Light is the fastest thing there is. Therefore, everything you perceive comes from a cone-shaped region of space-time that we call your past. But the lag from a person talking to you across a room isn't anything near 5 minutes--it's just a fraction of a second.

Edit--And I wouldn't say that there are 11 dimensions as if that's a fact. There might be many more dimensions than the 4 that we experience (3 space-like 1 time-like)every day. There isn't much (or any) evidence for them yet.

Edit2--and time IS orthogonal to the other dimensions. Orthogonality is just defined a bit differently in Lorentz space of course, because the metric is different, which is why time behaves differently than spatial dimensions.

Answer 2

There can be any number of dimensions. I have no idea where this idea of 11 dimensions comes from.

Also, while time is _a_ dimension, it is not _the_ 4th dimension. The fourth spatial dimension would necessarily be orthogonal (mutually perpendicular) to the first three. The fifth dimension would be orthogonal to the first four. We can't imagine that, but our lack of comprehension does not prevent such dimensions from existing.

Whatever you consider the fourth dimension to be, though, I doubt that it accounts for any time lags in our perception.

There has been some research that shows a definite lag between events and our perception of those events. The time lag measured in those experiments amounts to about 1/2 sec. Look up Benjamin Libet. It's possible that someone mis-remembered 0.5 sec as 5 min.

Answer 3

There are many dimensions, but it's so hard to define dimension. I'll say this: there exists a pi/2 dimension, a root(2) dimension, and a log(2) dimension. Weird, right?
Now, as for your speculation, the sound lag does not necessarily make it a different "dimension" in the mathematical sense of the word, maybe physical. As Einstein said, it's all relative.

Answer 4

Time is currently considered to be the fourth dimension. I know it's a strange concept but there is a reason for it and enough mathematical proofs.

I think what you are referring to is the idea that the sequence of events as we perceive them may not actually be the true sequence of things happening, it's our limited perception that puts them in a certain order so time as we know it is dependent on that. You have to think very differently to even entertain that thought, but I think recently Stephen Hawking came up with something similar.

As for other dimensions, one string theory suggests the existence of 26 dimensions, while another predicts 11.

The currently accepted one is the four dimensional space-time

Answer 5

String theory has suggested that high-dimensional objects called branes exist. The theory proposes the existence of ten or eleven (in M-theory) dimensions.

Space consists of 3 dimensions with time as the fourth (as used in relativity theory).

Answer 6

Personally I have always felt lost in a fourth dimension myself so its a real possibility.

Answer 7

There are actually 11 dimensions. They are all beyond our comprehension. Time is all relative and someday we may figure how to travel outside of it. What we hear may not even have been said yet.

Answer 8

actually time is the 4th dimension so that would be the 5th and ive never heard about that, explain it a bit more and i'll write something more.