Answers to the more specific questions:

Questions about 4D people

1. How would your backpack look different to a 4-D person? they could see the stuff inside it without opening it

2. Could a 4D person take a memory chip out of the computer in our classroom without opening the case? Yes, they could reach in and take it out in a direction that would go out of our 3D universe

 

or I could ask a very general question:

4. Explain something that would look different to a 4D person, and how it would look. You could explain about a backpack or a present or a computer or ...

4. p. 321 # 4 is a pretty good example . The answer to #4 is that a 2D person would have to tear barriers of3 and 4 to take the gold bar out. A 3D person wouldn't have any problems though, and could lift the gold out by taking it out of the 2D universe by pulling it up into the third dimension. If they did that, and a 2D person was watching, it would look like the gold bar just disappeared.

5. Draw a 2D box the way it would look to a 3D person (something like the box or toy box in the Flatland video)

6. Which of these two pictures would make the better 2-D person? Why?

The green guy (on the left) would be better because he can see things in his universe with his eye, and he can eat/talk to things in his universe with his mouth. The orange guy would be blind to things in his universe because his eye isn't pointing out into his universe from his body.

7. If a 3D person took something out of a 2D universe (like flatland) what would that look like to a 2D person who was watching it?
It would look like it just disappeared.

1D: a 1D universe is really boring because you can only go forwards and backwards. You can only see things right in front or right behind you. If you were a 1D person there would probably be a lot of your universe you couldn't see or get to.

Some questions I could ask are:

8. If you were a 1D person, how many other 1D people could you see directly? Not very many. Probably two--one in front and one behind you. It's possible that you could see only 1 or 0 people. If you lived in a really unusual universe (say, theta-shaped) there might be a few more, but that would be a really different sort of place than we experimented with in class.

9. describe what a 1D universe is like: I repeat myself: a 1D universe is really boring because you can only go forwards and backwards. You can only see things right in front or right behind you. If you were a 1D person there would probably be a lot of your universe you couldn't see or get to. Additionally or instead you might say: In a 1D universe you can only go forwards or backwards, and you can't go around anything that's in your way so it's easy to get stuck.