From: Wayne Hayes (wayne@cs.toronto.edu)
Date: Tue Dec 16 1997 - 10:31:41 MST
Mitchell Porter <mitch@thehub.com.au> writes:
>Suppose you get a sheet of paper and roll it up from bottom to top.
>The left side is not any closer to the right side than it was.
>In the same way, having compactified extra dimensions does not
>in itself mean that A is closer to B than it looks. I don't
>entirely discount the possibility of what you're talking about,
>but it would require geometries of a sort not presently contemplated.
Not at all. Go to altavista (http://altavista.digital.com) and search
for "space filling curves". There you will find ways to squeeze an
infinitely long 1-dimensional curve into a finite 2-dimensional space
(like a square). Although this doesn't put *every* point on the curve
infinitely close to every other point, it does put infinitely many
points at arbitrarily large distances along the curve, arbitrarily close
to each other in the square. This is just intended to give you an
"intuition" about how you can fold up a dimension to do the things
described previously.
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