Tesserects, Fractals & Wormholes

Post by **The Yosemite Bear** » 2002-12-09 05:13am

Anyone got any information about constructs that are supposably in violation of Geometic law?

ClaysGhost · Post by **ClaysGhost** » 2002-12-09 05:30am

Which geometry, and what do you mean by "violate"? Google probably lists plenty of sites going on about these things.

The Dark · Post by **The Dark** » 2002-12-09 01:01pm

I wasn't aware a tesseract violated geometry, since it's not a three-dimensional construct (I know at least four-dimensional geometry exists, we studied some of it in HS precalculus).

kojikun · Post by **kojikun** » 2002-12-09 05:53pm

Theres this scifi RPG called Valence 592 (shameless plug for a beloved thing) and in the game they use "Tesser[act]s" for FTL. Supposedly it comes from the book that inspired Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (I believe the book was called Into the Looking Glass or something)

Durandal · Post by **Durandal** » 2002-12-09 06:27pm

What are "geometric laws"? I've never heard of them. There are theorems which hold true in a Euclydian space, but that's all.

Drewcifer · Post by **Drewcifer** » 2002-12-09 10:12pm

There's also a mention of tesseracts in A wrinkle in time, by Madeleine L'Engle.

Well, the fifth dimension's a tesseract. You add that to the other four dimensions and you can travel through space without having to go the long way around. In other words to put it into Euclid, or old-fashioned plane geometry, a straight line is not the shortest distance between two points.

Durandal · Post by **Durandal** » 2002-12-10 01:03am

The problem is that the fifth dimension, according to M theory, is coiled up and imperceptible to us.

beyond hope · Post by **beyond hope** » 2002-12-10 01:33am

My understanding was that fractals are just complex geometric shapes, with most of the images you see being produced from complex number sets like the mandelbrot or julia sets. The colors you see are a graphic overlay showing how many iterations it took to determine whether a certain number was part of the set. The underlying math is an attempt to describe complex objects like the distribution of branches and leaves on a tree, or the potential path of water droplets. In fact, a tree would make a good example of a fractal. So, fractals aren't breaking any geometric laws I know of, rather they're one more form.