clifford_a-_pickover_surfing_through_hyperspacebookfi-org

200 appendix I
Perhaps a 4-D being's speech will propagate via 4-D sound (pressure) waves and
thus its speech will be partially audible to us. Philosopher Greg Weiss suggests that
we would hear something, but not likely the whole message, which may have
modulations in 4-D space. A 4-D creature could speak "down" to us, but unless we
have some way to manipulate four dimensions, we'd have trouble speaking to it in
its language.
Would a being's voice get louder as the creature grew closer to our 3-D space?
Would our houses shield our voices from them? If a 4-D being talked to us, would
the sound appear to come from everywhere at once, even from inside us?
Of course, we need not use speech to communicate. If we could transmit just a
single stream of bits (e.g., ones and zeros) into the fourth dimension, communication
would be possible. In fact, the rapid appearance and disappearance of a 4-D
object in our world could be used to communicate a binary message.
What would the writing of 4-D beings resemble? Our writing is one dimension
lower than the space in which we reside. Would the writing of 4-D beings be
three-dimensional? What would this writing look like if projected on a piece of
paper in our world (Figure H.I)?
Figure H.2 and H.3 are an artist's renditions of what a 4-D handwriting might
look like as it intersected our world. Wild!
As a final artistic piece, consider Figure H.4 by Professor Carlo H. Sequin from
the University of California, Berkeley. His representation is a projection of a 4-D
120-cell regular polytope (a 4-D analog of a polygon). This structure consists of
twelve copies of the regular dodecahedron — one of the five Platonic solids that
exist in 3-D space. This 4-D polytope also has 720 faces, 1200 edges, and 600 vertices,
which are shared by two, three, and four adjacent dodecahedra, respectively.
Figure H.I What would the intersection of Omegamorph handwriting with a piece
of paper look like? Would we recognized it as writing?