Living in Four Dimensions
Surprisingly, thinking about the fourth dimension is quite difficult for most people. Yet, what most people don’t realize is that they actually do it all the time.
I suppose the initial question is: what does the fourth dimension look like?
It’s not a good question, particularly because our eyesight is limited to seeing spatially in only three dimensions. However, it’s not difficult to imagine how the fourth dimension functions.
Imagine your room (whether you share it or not) a week from now. Or imagine the same room a week ago. Does it look the same? Is it cleaner/dirtier? Are you in it? It’s not hard to imagine, right?
If it isn’t, congratulations! You’re officially thinking in the fourth dimension. As you can probably guess, the fourth dimension in our own world is time, which is why it’s almost impossible to place this in visual terms. I mean, can you see time?
But that’s essentially how the fourth dimension works. If you say that you want to look at something at a certain time with coordinates for the length, width, and height, then you’ve given four different pieces of information that compose a point in the fourth dimension. See, our minds think of dimensions as things we can “move” through. Technically, we do move through time, it’s just not as deliberate as moving outside of your room or five blocks away. This helps explain why the mind cannot visualize this mysterious fourth dimension; we only travel through it in one direction! We don’t have to deliberately expend energy to do this, which is why the mind isn’t equipped right away to think about the fourth dimension.
In the book, “Flatland,” the shapes in the two-dimensional world are confused because they cannot perceive what the sphere, from the three-dimensional world, looks like. Since these shapes can only look in the two dimensions, they only see a circle that can continually change shape. To us in the third-dimension, it’s a sphere that has a singular radius, which can be cut in several ways to yield the circles of different radii that explains why the two-dimensional shapes are so confused. To us, a “sphere” in the fourth dimension will only look like a regular three-dimensional sphere when it intersects with our world. In fact, the shape looks visually different in the fourth dimension (if you can imagine time as a line, and then add the other three dimensions, you’ve ascertained what it visually looks like).
Knowing that you live in four dimensions makes the world look differently, right? Probably not, but it does mean you’ve understood how much more limited humans are by their limited ability to perceive.
