Old_Zircon - 2016-02-15
You use the 4th dimension whenever you walk in general, since the 4th dimension has almost universally meant time for the last century or so. What this guy's talking about is more typically labelled the FIFTH dimension, even though it describes the 4th dimension in n-dimensional space.
It's not really a standardize terminology though, so I guess technically he's not wrong, it's more just a bit of an archaic way to describe it.
Auto 5 for hyperspace.
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Old_Zircon - 2016-02-15 If I'm off base here I'd love to learn why, this stuff is fascinating.
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Monkey Napoleon - 2016-02-15 Eh, not really. Dimensions aren't labelled by numbers, and the labels are sort of arbitrary. They really serve no purpose other than to be distinct in equations.
It's common shorthand to refer to four dimensions when what you actually mean is four spacial dimensions, and if you're going to be numbering them it kind of makes no sense to group our three spacial dimensions, have the time dimension as the fourth, and then another spacial dimension as the fifth.
It's also not universally accepted that time is a "real" "dimension". It's a lot like many concepts in quantum physics in that treating it this way conveniently subtracts what we don't know about it from the equations we're working with, but that's really not enough to safely say this is how it really is.
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Old_Zircon - 2016-02-15 I agree it doesn't make sense to use 1-3 for the first three spatial dimensions and 4 for time but I thought that was kind of the informal standard since Einstein really caught on. Most of my info is from older Michio Kaku stuff like Hyperspace, though.
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jfcaron_ca - 2016-02-15 We usually use 0 as the time index and 1-3 as the spatial indices when we do special relativity using four-vectors (especially in computer code with 0-based indexing). Then you can easily generalize to any number of spatial dimensions since time is always the 0th one. Also time is special and there's only ever one of those, so 0 is nice for that.
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Robin Kestrel - 2016-02-15
/noclipping
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