Brian Wecht

speaker

852 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 5 Sep

Brian Wecht’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.

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The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe · The Skeptics Guide #1104 - Sep 5 2026 · 5 Sep 2026 podcast

is not the way any physicist thinks about tachyons.

Tachyons to a physicist, a theoretical physicist, because they're theoretical, are indicative of some problem with your vacuum state of the theory.

All right.

So we're going to go to number one.

Although the volume of a D-dimensional cube with sides of length one stays constant as you increase the number of dimensions, the volume of a D-dimensional sphere with radius one grows without bound, having the asymptotic functional form of an exponential.

This is the fiction.

So why, Jay?

I mean, Jay got it right.

you, it's F-dimension.

D-dimension is bullshit.

Yeah.

I will say the first half of this is obvious that the hypercube stays constant volume because if the lengths are all side one, then the volume is one times one times one times one

times one times one, et cetera, to any number of dimensions.

Now, in some sense, that is how you define higher volumes, right?

You take that cube as like your unit volume in the higher dimensions.

So that's a little bit of a hedge, but that is how you define volumes.

The interesting thing about higher dimensional spheres

Can anyone guess what happens to the volume of a sphere as the dimension goes to pi r-squared?

pi r-squared is the area of a two-dimensional sphere.

So the sphere with radius r in d dimensions has a volume that goes like r to the d, right?

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