Is Portal showing us the real 4th dimension?

For a large amount of time now, people have been saying that the 4th dimension is time.

But lately I've been thinking, "Which dimension do you move through in the Potal games?" Because in Portal 1 & 2, you clearly do not move exclusively in the 3rd.

If you've watched Rob Bryanton's Imagining the Tenth Dimension, you'll know that sometimes new dimensions occur, when you "fold" previous ones, (If you haven't and hate your brain, I recommend you do so now) allowing us to seemingly jump from one end of a dimension to another, which is basically what Portal is all about. The portalling in the puzzle-series is actually almost identical to Bryanton's example with the ant.

So should the scientists of our world sit down, play Portal, and rethink their theories about time as the 4th dimension?

What do you think?

You mean Time?

No, clocks and maps show us that.

Thank you sir for reminding me of that awesome science vid. Also I would rather some scientist talk about that idea and why that idea may/may not be feasible, preferably in a similarly-styled video.

@Davey: The actual 4th dimension: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-dimensional_space

Let Carl Sagan explain the 4th dimension

the man was a genius

The Meat Dimension is the 4th dimension.

I thought that the portals were wormholes, so kinda?

Portals can't go through time the way they go through space so the answer is no.

@Vegsen said:

The Meat Dimension is the 4th dimension.

Portals can't go through time the way they go through space so the answer is no.

"don't you understand timmy, you were in the forth dimension all along."

You're moving through the third dimension in Portal, just in a different way than you normally would.

kind of. portal is cool game. i enjoyed the game a lot.

You're traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind; a journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination — Next stop, the 4th dimension.

@Galiant said:

@kashif1

Portals can't go through time the way they go through space so the answer is no.

Considering that you can move across a distance using portals that would otherwise take longer to traverse without them...think about it!

Thats still movement in space, you can not however move forward or backward in time, they just save time.

@kashif1: You do know that space and time is not two things right? there is only, one thing, called spacetime

Haha, what a necro. I guess it is possible that the "how" in Portal is a fourth spatial dimension the same way a two dimensional wormhole can be visualised in a 3D space, but the games are not a real physical system so the point is kind of moot. The problem here is thinking that a fourth spatial dimension cannot coexist with the time dimension anyway.

In other 4th dimensional space news, Miegakure is still not released yet...

No. They don't.They are 3 dimensional or digital constructs designed to help you perceive time. They don't show you time at all.

Semiotics!

As someone with a physics degree, I hate to burst your bubble, but most of this extra dimensional stuff is just theory. Not in the sense that the theory of evolution is a theory, but in the sense that's there's actually very little corroborating proof of extra dimensions. Some sub-atomic particles' behavior is easier to describe if we posit the existence of more spatial dimensions. This stuff is far from any real world application (short of making the math make more sense in and of itself) and certainly not in any way proof of the actual physical existence of these dimensions. Just because the behavior of a photon is easier to describe if we assume it exists on the surface of a 27-dimensional hypersphere does not mean that those 27 dimensions actually exist in some way, shape or form outside the realm of pure mathematics.

In layman's terms. Some scientists found when dealing with certain things, 2 + 2 equaled 5. This didn't make any sense, so they posited that maybe those numbers acted differently because they were from a different place that we couldn't perceive. They plugged the numbers back in under these new assumptions and got results. Thus theories of multiple dimensions were born.

It's all very interesting, and has some wild implications, but still completely impractical in a real world sense.