+1 athiestsFollow

Maybe God wanted it to form ice DNA, Mr. Smart Guy!

All hail our new Ice Overlords!

Uh, maybe god IS the Double Helix.

looks like the pagan snake worshiping doctors got to that first




I like theses though



Edited, Dec 18th 2006 10:24am by Kelvyquayo

Even the points of a helix would have to occupy more than one dimension though. In order for it to take up space it needs to have a location on the X, Y and Z axis. It still doesn't make sense that it could only have one physical property.

Totem

I swear I've seen this episode of Star Trek: TNG.

I think he's talking about either Where Silence Has Lease, where Data and Pulaski have a cute little bonding moment pondering the notion of non-dimension being a dimension.

or if he is sticking with the original post perhaps both The Naked Time of the original series and The Naked Now of NextGen where the crews get infected with a disease that travels along stings of water molecules.

I did the double helix with Kelvy's mother last night, it was fantastic.

But that's my point, Kelvy. In order of anything to occupy space, say, on the X axis, it also has to occupy space on the Y and Z axis, otherwise it is a contradiction of terms. Nothing can be on a longitudinal line without having some thickness or depth to it, or it wouldn't exist. The only single dimension I can think of where something-- or rather nothing, ie zero --can be is the 4th dimension, time. But once you give something a physical property like molecules, it must hold a point in space, thus occupying at least three, and to my unscientificly oriented brain, four dimensions.

Explain this to me. Obviously smarter people than ol' Totem are making a distinction somewhere that is woooshing over my head.

Totem

This is what I thought of, too! And yet, in the past couple of weeks I've twice been asked to list my favorite books, and every time I forget to list CAT'S CRADLE, which is just too friggin' awesome to not be listed on a list of favorite books. (I could have totally excised the last six words from that sentence. But I didn't.)

And, just to nitpick--the atheists don't need any +1 in the science of figuring out the origins of stuff. All of the evidence points to Godless evolution, and none whatsoever points to Bible Fairy Tales. So with this +1 we're scoring about 2,000,001 points of science to Creation's big fat goose egg. Think anyone will wise up when we get to 3 mil?

Mathmetically helixes occupy three dimensions. They are formed by drawing a straight line on a cylindrical plane.

I would surmsie that Kelvyquayo is trying to describe a 3 dimensional helix in which the line line has no width or thickness.

Singularities supposedly have zero volume. Cosmic strings supposedly have 1 dimension. And domain walls etc.

The fourth dimension is not time. It is a paralell extension of the third dimension.


CPL is boring.

Well the z axis is part of the third dimension, the fourth would have a separate label, such as w. It is in discussion how many dimensions we exist in and if there is a limit, but mathematically you can create any number of dimensions for any object you want. Tesseracts are four dimensional "cubes." An n-sphere is an n+1 dimensional sphere.

Time is only referred to as the fourth dimension when discussing space time fabric involved in Einstein's theory. Time is treated as part of a four dimensional manifold there.

Dimensions are added by extending a rank of dimension parallel to itself. For exmaple take a line segement and extend it parallel, you get a square. Take a square and pull it "upwards" in parallel you get a cube. By extending a cube in parallel (very difficult to visualise) you get a hypercube, a tesseract. This can be continued forever. And just as you observing from the third dimension look down onto a slide of paramecium (approximately two dimensional) and can see everything inside of them so to could someone observing from a fourth dimension see all layers of your insides simultaneously. A sphere passing through a 2d plane would look like a circle that suddenly appears, grows larger, shrinks, and then disappears. Likewise a higher dimensional hypersphere passing through a 3d polyhedron would look like a sphere that suddenly appears, grows larger, shrinks and disappears.


Flatland is a nice, short little book that helps explain the relationships between higher and lower tier dimensions.

Edited, Dec 20th 2006 6:12am by Allegory