Forget the 3D Printer: 4D Printing Could Change Everything

Smithsonian ^ | MAY 16, 2014 | Randy Rieland

[Hotlanta Mike]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gMCZFHv9v8

[LibWhacker]

Aha! If M-theory is right, there are 11 dimensions. Pick any four.

[Red Badger]

Soon I can print one and stop ‘imagining’......................

[MortMan]

Being that the interior cube is smaller than the exterior, the angles between the exterior cube faces and the support rods for the interior cube cannot be right angles.

[Future Snake Eater]

I wonder if you could combine this tech with nanotechnology and wifi or Bluetooth. To go with the shoe example, you use a smart watch to send a signal to the nano-robots in your shoe that you’re going to play basketball, so the nano-robots apply the proper stimulation to get the shoe to change to the appropriate shape.

[MrB]

But they are 90’s in 4 dimensions. And the interior cube is the same size.
As an analogy, think about drawing a cube on a piece of paper.
The angles on the paper are not rt angles, but in three dims they would be.

[MortMan]

The cube angles are right angles. But the diagonal supports going from one corner of the outer cube to the corresponding corner of the inner cube are not. My remark is about the angles on the supports.

The inner cube, based on the drawing, cannot be the same size as the outer. The inner’s 6 walls are presented as being inside the outer cube’s walls. For perspective to be in play, at least one wall would have to be outside the outer cube.

[MrB]

That’s only one way (and the easiest) to represent a hypercube.
Another way is to envision two 3d cubes, “open” the corner of one and place it “inside” the other, and connect all the corresponding corners. The resulting 8 cubes, as is in the prior illustration, have 2 that look “normal” and 6 that are skewed due to the down-dimensioning representation in 3d.

Read “And he built a crooked house” by Heinlein for more detail.

[Mycroft Holmes]

Also good to keep in mind is that this object, if moved along the 4th axis through the 3D space you are observing would appear as a point and grow to a full sized cube then shrink again to a point before vanishing from your view. To your perception, it would always be a cubic object or a point.

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