Timeline for Where does the Sun go at night?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
10 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Nov 25, 2014 at 5:57 | comment | added | Brian Ballsun-Stanton | Please integrate these comments into your answer, Joshua. | |
| Nov 19, 2014 at 22:50 | comment | added | Joshua Taylor | (Took too long to edit that.) As for the Mario game, that's a good analogy, and certainly helps to work out the details. Also, you can use Minecraft as a conceptual model without replicating the exact method it uses to achieve that effect. The people on the plane might only see a 3D projection of whatever the true geometry is. | |
| Nov 19, 2014 at 22:44 | comment | added | Joshua Taylor | Good point about the sun intersecting the infinite ground under the surface. Thinking about it a little more, to keep the sun in the same place in the sky might require 5 dimensions (the people on the ground would see a 3D projection of this 5D geometry when they looked up). | |
| Nov 19, 2014 at 6:31 | comment | added | Please stop being evil | 2) You are correct that a Sun whose plane of rotation included a vector with a 4th dimensional component would allow the Sun to orbit the plane without passing through the ground- almost. The issue with this is two-fold: first the plane is also infinitely deep and the Sun necessarily appears in it (as a cave though), and second the Sun would do a rather awful job of illuminating the world (what with it being gone most of the day). The Sun would only be present in the Plane's 3-space when it's 4th dimensional position vector is 0, which occurs twice around its circle, at opposite ends. | |
| Nov 19, 2014 at 6:24 | comment | added | Please stop being evil | 1) There are some non-Euclidean geometries that would have a sun at infinite distance be even more intersecting of the Material Plane as I previously conceived it (such as the popular projective geometry, where all parallel lines meet at infinity) but no reasonable geometry of any kind, and certainly not Euclidean geometry, allows a point in 3 dimensions to be connected to another point on the other side of a plane without the connection passing through the plane. Doing so would violate the Two Policemen and a Drunk theorem. | |
| Nov 19, 2014 at 4:43 | comment | added | GMJoe | Would an infinitely-large sun an infinite distance away that travels around an infinite plane need to travel an infinite number of times faster than its own light in order to appear to be in the right place at the right time? | |
| Nov 18, 2014 at 22:42 | comment | added | doppelgreener | You should explain further about how the 4th dimension would help. An analogy to a 2D Mario game with a 3D sun might be helpful, where the 3D sun revolves through the 2D plane (towards and away from the Mario game's player). It would still very thoroughly illuminate Mario's world - possibly even the underground - though it would eventually have to pass through a spot beneath somehow. I have no idea how this would look to the inhabitants, though... | |
| Nov 18, 2014 at 22:33 | comment | added | SevenSidedDie | Your first proposed geometry doesn't really make sense; unless the sun is infinitely far away already, teleporting a million miles will make it move in the sky. Note that using Minecraft as a conceptual model for this is a bad idea: in Minecraft, every player actually has their own personal sun, invisible to everyone else, that moves with them and obeys the world clock (verifiable by inspecting the decompiled code), rather than there being one sun that determines the time as in the RPG scenario in question. | |
| Nov 18, 2014 at 22:33 | review | First posts | |||
| Nov 18, 2014 at 22:44 | |||||
| Nov 18, 2014 at 22:30 | history | answered | Joshua Taylor | CC BY-SA 3.0 |