Friday 27 May 2011

Area 51 covered elsewhere and curved surfaces

Last week I spent quite a bit of time talking about Area 51, but apparently someone else covered it quite completely, so I guess I don't need to mention it anymore.  :-)

So, Frank tried again to explain to me how the Door works. He wrote some equations on the chalkboard as he talked, but it just looked to me like a bunch of squigglies. Then he showed me a picture in a book he had, and it looked neat, and I said that I'd seen a similar hole at a minature golf course. (He didn't like it when I said that.) He explained the picture as showing a hole representing the Door, curved space in a flat area, except that our Door is a curved thingy in a flat space.

It's difficult for me to explain (especially as I don't understand it myself), but at least he did give me some kind of approach to getting my head wrapped around it: Picture a flat world where all the people living there are two-dimensional. Then try to explain to them how you can bend their world and connect two distant points. It's the same thing with the Door, except it's a three-dimensional world being bent through the fourth dimension.

It seems that the topic has been covered quite well, too. You just have to know where to look for the info. I'll see if I can get a hold of some of those reference books and let you know what I find by next week.

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