Castling and the 4th Dimension

Will someone help me?  Thx

There was a strange Physics Ph.D. student named William in my graduate dorm at IIT.  He had a strong "Southie" Boston accent and walked through the hallways bumping into people while holding his hands in front of his face and moving his fingers at strange angles.  We dubbed him, "Weird Willie."

One day, I asked, "Willie, why do you move your hands like that?"

"I'm trying to see the 4th physical dimension," he replied.

As a chemistry grad student, I know we cannot explain the movement of electrons through thin (molecule sized) openings without invoking the idea that possibly many physical dimensions - or universes- are operating at once. so I did not find Willie's answer so strange.

Think about it. Imagine a society where they can only see 2 of the three physical dimensions - they can't see height. But you, seeing height can easily pass over a bank line (2 dimensional wall) and rob the bank.  Instead of walking across a floor, along a wall, and across the ceiling to get to the middle, you can just reach up and touch it.

Similarly, someone who can see four physical dimensions may see shortcuts to get to other continents or even other planets.

A  couple years later, graduation approached and I said my goodbyes to school friends, I had a long talk with Willie and asked, "By the way, how's the 4th dimension thing going?"

He smiled and declared, "I've almost got it!"

Not long after, Willie apparently disappeared!

My guess is someone's going to find his desiccated body on Mars, with his hands in front of his face in a failed attempt at trying to get home!

One more  point that no one has posted.  The chessboard is actually a finite 2d world.  Time in the 2d world of chess is the 3rd dimension.

Haha!

"how exactly is it that the king and rook are able to move past one another - which they must do in order to change places - when the player makes this move?"

Rather than seek a complex scientific reason, why not just accept Ockham's razor and go with the simple. It's not 4th dimension hullabaloo. It's witchcraft and sorcery.

The answer is  symmetric movement.  Very similar to symmetric movement in physics.  It cannot be observed  except indirectly.  For example warping of space (gravity).  We can only detect it indirectly by observing light traveling along a curved path in the warped space.  First detected in 1919 during an eclipse of the sun when it was determined that  stars that are normally behind the sun appeared to be to the side of the sun.

sheesh...all the garble-de-gook. it's witchcraft for crying out loud!

No,  newengland7, this is the physics as it has developed over the last 100 years.

For educational purposes, especially for kids, it  is worthwhile to draw parallels between chess and physics that are cogent, succinct and understandable.

<Macer75>

The answer to your query is simple. 

You see, mass is actually quite spacey. 

If each particle could be likened to a planet, the space between them in any piece of material (king, rook) can be compared to the actual space between planets and stars in the sky. This is the actual proportion. 

So matter should easily pass through matter, no problem at all - if someone takes care of these particles, that they simply don't collide with each other but sort of "bypass" each other. 

Probably, with a little care and attention, one could also make a solar system pass through another solar system without any trouble. 

Another thing is, that even for those particles as do exist among these mind-boggling amounts of space - we aren't sure that these are even particles - they may only be vibrations of some undetermined, unknown quality in the space itself - which makes castling even easier than could be thought before the last paragraph. 

I hope things are clearer now. 

the rook goes to the 4th dimension because in online chess you move the king and the rook appears on the new square by itself

This may look like a pure philosophical exercise but I would like to suggest a different key to read this: no one knows exactly where this game come from or who invented it, this game has number of possible combinations which can be compared to the number of atoms in the universe, so why to exclude the idea that castling is the hint for the 4th dimension that the inventor (s) put in the game?

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Chess is a 2 dimension game.  You don't  need a 4th dimension.  The 3rd dimension is time.

"Also, it cannot be explained why the king/rook only uses its powers to castle, and behaves as a piece that exists only in the third dimension on all other occasions."  wrong ! it's 2d not 3d.

Symmetric time ( motion, etc.) (like the warping of space (gravity) cannot be observed directly.  Gravitational lensing is an indirect way of observing the symmetric warping  of  space. )  In 3d chess time it is also symmetric motion.  The players cannot directly observe it.  But they can indirectly observe it.

There are plenty of sourcebooks on witchcraft and sorcery spell-books out there.

You missed another possible explanation, one from quantum mechanics:

The king and rook are initially entangled, therefore mathematically they exist in both positions at the same time, then by the act of observing them the wave function describing their positions collapses, whereupon they are forced to make a decision as to their real positions, which can then become a castled position. Or something like that.

Sqod good call.  You spotted what was next.  It is my conjecture that quantum entanglement is symmetric motion and it is instantaneous.  We cannot see the symmetric motion but we can see the asymmetric instantaneous change in spin.

Your description of castling is spot on.  

About 5 yrs. ago after several years of thought experiment  and research especially on the internet I got lucky and finally I proposed  an experiment:   What is  faster Warping of space(gravity) or Quantum Entanglement.  I  thought of it because of an experiment I saw in Middle school.  What is faster light or sound.  It turns out that a physicist from Stanford University has been researching with associates ER=EPR.  I think they are pretty much  spot on. 

Thanks for your post.  Your idea of considering the K and R as quantum entangled is exactly the idea that came to me when I was playing around with finite 2d chess physics.  I used the same solution for the N so that it wouldn't have to leave the surface of the board and everything would be consistent with a 2 dimensional world with a 3rd time dimension.

Hmm. That also means en passant could be a case of a quantum eraser: the leaping pawn is observed by the opponent, his awareness instantaneously forces the newly advanced pawn to assume a status (location) it had earlier in time, thereby erasing its more advanced position, which then allows the opponent to capture it at its earlier location, which is one square behind its its intended square.

I have also worked out the 5 forces in the universe and how they relate  to the power of the pawns and pieces.  Each pawn and piece exerts a different force that has a parallel in the universe.