Tesseract?? As I read Wrinkle in Time, I’m lost on each dimension but especially the fifth where time and space FOLD? HELP me understand?
In: Planetary Science
A line is a 1-dimensional object. Put a bunch of lines together, and you get a square, a two-dimensional object. Put a bunch of squares together and you get a cube, a 3-dimensional object.
After this, human perception starts having trouble, because we can only perceive three dimensions, but if you could put a bunch of cubes together in a 4-dimensional space, that would be a tesseract.
[This site](https://brilliant.org/wiki/tesseract/) has a more detailed explanation and a video that shows what a tesseract would look like to us 3-dimensional beings if we managed to interact with one.
It’s a way of visualizing four-dimensional space in the third-dimension — a cube within a cube. If you think of each spot within the inner cube as a specific point in space, you can sort of get an idea about how four-dimensional space works by thinking of the inner cube’s location in the outer cube as an additional parameter to identify a specific point in space.
It’s worth emphasizing a tesseract is not a four-dimensional representation, it’s a three-dimensional representation of four-dimensional space.
There’s a lot to take on trust once we get past 3 dimensions (and a Tesseract is a 4-dimensional concept). We can observe 1 dimension, 2 dimensions, 3 dimensions, we can even kinda get our heads around a fourth dimension of time, but after that we’re into pure imagination.
A classic mind experiment is “flatland” where everybody and everything is 2-dimensional. In that 2D world, a line is as an infinitely tall wall would be to us. There’s no way to imagine another dimension. If you drew a shape on the 2d plane, it would spontaneously appear complete and infinite in the 2D world. Picking up a 2D person and putting them back down would mean they vanished and reappeared as if teleported. The problems the 2D world occupants experience understanding our 3D world are those we experience understanding a 4D+ world, so you’re not alone. It’s hard to understand, there’s a lot to take on faith.
Anyway a Tesseract is a 4D “cube” (insofar as that adequately describes anything!)
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