clifford_a-_pickover_surfing_through_hyperspacebookfi-org
clifford_a-_pickover_surfing_through_hyperspacebookfi-org
clifford_a-_pickover_surfing_through_hyperspacebookfi-org
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86 <strong>surfing</strong> <strong>through</strong> hyperspace<br />
"That's a good question. 1 I have no answer, but now it seems that the<br />
Omegamorphs are changing all that."<br />
Sally tosses the tennis ball to you. "If we lived on a hyperspherical universe<br />
and you traveled to a point in the universe that was furthest from<br />
me, I would still be able to see you with a telescope in no matter what<br />
direction I looked."<br />
"That's true if the sphere were not too large."<br />
"If I could see you no matter where I looked, would you seern infinitely<br />
big to me?"<br />
You place the tennis balls back in the cabinet. "Yes. Even stranger, I<br />
would be 'inside out.' In other words, instead of my skin and hair forming<br />
a surface around my guts, it would seem that my guts were on the<br />
outside, and my hair and skin would be surrounding you! Of course, I<br />
wouldn't notice anything strange. I wouldn't be about to die. To me, you<br />
would look infinitely large arid inside out" (Fig. 4.2c).<br />
You toss a basketball to Sally. "Next lesson. If you cut this sphere with<br />
a plane, you'd produce a circle. If you cut a hypersphere with a 3-D<br />
hyperplane, the cross section is a sphere."<br />
Sally looks at the basketball. "What happens if you try to cut a hypersphere<br />
with an ordinary 2-D plane?"<br />
"Sally, you can't slice a hypersphere into two pieces with a 2-D plane.<br />
A hyperbasketball, sliced down the middle by a plane, remains in one<br />
piece, just like a sphere pierced with a line does not fall apart into two<br />
separate pieces. This means that a guillotine for a hyperbeing would be a<br />
3-D object like a cube, not a plane."<br />
You take the basketball from Sally's hands and deflate it with a pin. "If<br />
I asked you to turn this basketball inside out, could you?"<br />
Sally studies it for a moment. "I don't think so, not without cutting<br />
it."<br />
You nod. "Correct. However, a flexible sphere of any dimension can<br />
be turned inside out <strong>through</strong> the next-highest dimension. For example,<br />
we 3-D beings can turn a rubber ring inside out so that its outer surface<br />
becomes the inner, and the inner becomes the outer. Try it with a rubber<br />
band. Similarly, a hyperbeing could grab this basketball and turn it inside<br />
out <strong>through</strong> his space."<br />
"Does this mean that a hyperbeing could turn a human inside out?"<br />
"From a practical standpoint, we're not quite as flexible as a rubber<br />
ball. We're also not spheres. We're more like a sphere with a digestive tube