Ask HN: Visualizing a Sphere | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Visualizing a Sphere

5 pointsthree_fourteen4 comments

Hi HN,

This is going to be a strange question; but if any audience is going to appreciate it I think HN will :)

I started meditating in January with the goal of reaching an hour of consecutive meditation by the end of the year. I’m on a 218 day streak and I’m already up to 62 minutes and now intend to get to 90 minutes by the end of the year.

Another hobby is reading, where I have been able to use the right hemisphere of my brain to visualize concepts rather than subvocalizing the words, bringing my reading speed to 500-600 words per minute with a solid understanding (non-fiction).

My question is: how can I understand and visualize a sphere in my mind’s eye from an atomic and mathematical perspective? E.g. what books on geometry, physics, equations, or techniques would one recommend?

Why a sphere? As I’m sure many here know it is the most powerful of all shapes. Planets are spherical due to the pressure of their own gravity, this shape has the least amount of surface and thus conserves energy.

It’s a Sunday so hopefully you’ll entertain my strange question :)

Dude what kind of pseudo-intellectual babble is this.

You literally just described what a sphere is. It’s the collection of points in every possible direction, equidistant from a center point.

> where I have been able to use the right hemisphere of my brain to visualize concepts rather than subvocalizing the words

Would you provide any references or documentation on how someone else might learn to successfully do that?

Taking your sphere question literally, you might first consider a 1-dimensional world and all the points in that world that are a distance of 1 from the origin. After that consider a 2-dimensional world and all the points that are a distance of 1 from the origin. Then a 3-dimensional world. After that you mastered that you might do a Google search for wiki 3-sphere and see what you find.

There is no sphere.

Can you elaborate? Or is this a pun about wave particle collapse;)

“Planar geometry is sometimes called flat or Euclidean geometry. The geometry on a sphere is an example of a spherical or elliptic geometry. Another kind of non-Euclidean geometry is hyperbolic geometry. Spherical and hyperbolic geometries do not satisfy the parallel postulate.” https://math.hmc.edu/funfacts/spherical-geometry/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com