I forget where I heard this but someone mentioned that a 4-dimensional being could mirror you. Doesn’t sound so bad until you realize your amino acids & stuff would all be the opposite chirality, which means you could no longer process food.
This, the mirroring part, also happens in an Arthur C. Clarke short story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_Error
Mass Effect has a similar idea. There are species that eat levo foods and ones that eat dextro foods.
Heh, eating isn’t the only time they have to worry about protein absorption.
There’s a great YA book about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boy_Who_Reversed_Himself?wprov=sfla1
He spins you around for fun, and puts you back when he’s done, but off by a hundredth of a degree. Depending on how strict your interpretation is, you either no longer exist in the same 3D universe except at that single point of intersection, or you will drift off from it the further you move from your current location.
This is a comic adaptation of the 1884 (that’s not a typo) Flatland, but in the book, instead of rotating, they explain the concept of the next higher dimension. Similar result. Good book, nails the social satire of sexism (remains relevant today).
Fun fact, the Mandelbrot set is a 2-dimensional set (because it’s defined in the complex plane). However, its boundary line is a fractal, which can be understood as having a non-integer dimension (i.e., between 1, the topological dimension of a line, and 2, the dimension of a plane). There are multiple ways to define fractal dimensions such as the Hausdorff dimension. For example, the Sierpinski triangle has a Hausdorff dimension of 1.58. But the Mandelbrot set is special here, too, as it seems to have a Hausdorff dimension of 2, meaning that its boundary is so curly that it fills “a plane’s worth of space” despite its line-like topology.
Silly, the Mandelbrot set is just 2D. Payback’s a bitch, motherfucker.
