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clifford_a-_pickover_surfing_through_hyperspacebookfi-org

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SATAN AND PERPENDICULAR WORLDS 59<br />

Figure 3.4<br />

The retina of a 4-D being's eye.<br />

edges, and distinguish between small gradations in intensity and color. In<br />

fact, there are many millions of cells to aid us in gaining insight about our<br />

world: 125 million rods and cones, several million intervening cells in the<br />

retina, and one million neurons in the lateral geniculate nucleus, the first<br />

major processing station for visual input. If we have 125 million rods and<br />

cones in our 2-D retina, I'd expect roughly 1.3 trillion cells in the 3-D<br />

retina of a 4-D being's eye."<br />

"Wow, how did you come up with that?"<br />

"You need to first take the square root of 125 million to estimate the<br />

number of cells in a single dimension, and then cube that. Because the<br />

retinas are one dimension less than the dimension of the creature, we<br />

could estimate the number of cells in all higher-dimensional retinas."<br />

You glance out the window and sense something moving nearby. You<br />

lift your head but see nothing unusual. You roll down the window, but<br />

that doesn't help. Should you step out of the car to look?<br />

And then he appears. An old man in a Santa Claus outfit. He seems to<br />

tower above the crowds, but strangely none of the police find him peculiar.<br />

Yet the man is clearly out of place. For some reason, you feel embar-

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