Four Dimensional Owl

I am reading Rudy Rucker's "The Fourth Dimension and how to get there " AGAIN. This must be the er.... fourth time so I should be able to see something this time. Mr Rucker says that he has had about 15 minutes of direct visibility of the fourth dimension in his lifetime (well he had had in 1984 when he wrote that). I have been trying to see the fourth dimension for some time and only very occasionally do I even begin to understand the real situation. Once or twice, while looking at a rotating Stereo version of the three dimensional projection of a Hypercube, I have managed to understand what exactly was happening to the 4d version without actually seeing the extra dimension. It must be possible to train your mind to handle this extra perpendicularity (nice word). Intellectually it is always possible; the maths works easily but we have the inbuilt view of a world of only 3 dimensions. I can imagine all three dimensions of many objects - inside as well as out so my mind has the spherical 3d retina that Mr Rucker describes as being required to see the fourth dimension. I like to think it is only then, a matter of training to be able to 'see' things in 4d space. Maybe I just don't have the rigour to be able to do it.

Our maths teacher at school got us to calculate distances between points in four dimensions and the calculations are simple pythagoras ( I think our physics teacher was surprised when we started writing programs to carry out the calculations). I suppose that this simple existence of maths relating to the fourth dimension means that it must exist even if we cannot see it. It's a bit like the bit I wrote about being able to imagine places outside the Universe which we are physically able to reach or touch with our senses, remember Bishop Berkeley's "Tree in the quad" :-

There was a young man who said: "God
Must find it extremely odd,
When he sees that this tree
Continues to be,
When there's no one about in the quad."

And the reply:

"Dear Sir, Your astonishment's odd,
I am always about in the quad.
And that's why this tree
Continues to be,
Since observed by, Yours faithfully, God

This always reminds me of the world's lonliest tree which was hundreds of miles from any other tree somewhere in the North African desert. Its fate was to be run into by a man driving a truck. I cannot find a link other than a very tenuous one with just a hand drawn picture of the said incident. At least there was someone there to see and hear the tree fall. Now if it had been Bishop Berkeley who had run into it ....

The Bishop Berkeley page reminds me in turn of the conversations with StarGlider from "The Fountains of Paradise" because of its references to Thomas Aquinas and further to "Apologia pro vita sua" not because I have actually read any of them apart from "The Fountains of Paradise" but because of some circular memory of academic life that is encompassed by Aquinas, Newman and Berkeley. How to make yourself sound clever without actually knowing anything.

A final question. What is my blog when no-one is reading it? I know that this is most of the time and probably even all the time when I am not actually logged in. The information is there and there are two ways of looking at it; one is the physical electrical image of this data which is tiny and the other is the actual information which just hangs around in some intellectual mind space outside of the world of the senses. This is dangerously like what I think is probably Greek Philosophy so it is time to go for now.