Understanding the Fourth Dimension
By: Ishank Sharma
Tags: God, Universe, Existential Crises, Meaning Of Life, Fourth Dimension

Disclaimer: This article can give you existential crisis, read at your own risk.

What on earth is a fourth dimension?

There are multiple ways of describing it, some people might say it is time and some might say it is an extension of 3d objects perpendicular to itself. Both the definitions are correct and they are just a different aspect to describe the fourth dimension. But this blog is meant to understand the spatial aspect of the fourth dimension and not time!

We live in a three-dimensional world where everything has length, width, and height. Now if I ask you if there could be a more attribute to it? What would come to your mind?

Now let us try to empathize with a person who lives in a 2-dimensional world, the only thing he can see is the length and width of an object, if you ask him the same question i.e if there could be one more attribute to the objects other than length and width, he will probably say he doesn’t know! but we being a 3-dimensional living entity can easily pull out of the 2-dimensional being along the line perpendicular to his world and make him see 3-dimensional objects.

But will it actually make him see the 3-d world? Absolutely no, because the set of eyes he has can only see 2d, so what is it that he will be going to see?

Well, he will be seeing a very strange world that is appearing and disappearing in front of his eyes. Strange right?

Let us take a small example to understand this observation.

Imaging we pass a sphere through his 2d world, the first thing the person would see will be a point, slowly that point would appear to be increasing in size and then again it will shrink back and disappear!

This would probably give the flat-lander a hard time digesting what is actually happening in his 2-dimensional world. But we as 3d beings know what’s happening.

Now let us apply the same logic in a 3-dimensional world. This time we will pass a 4d object through a 3d world, so how would it look now?

Notice how the shape of the cube is changing, and we also see that the cubes are disappearing into thin air!

But now if we empathize with a 4d being, we know that the cubes didn’t actually disappear! but they just went out of our 3d world.

Still didn’t understand?

I have been through a similar situation and I know that it can be challenging to understand the complete concept. But still, let us try to watch this video to understand things a little better

Mind-blowing right! I am sure whatever we talked about till now, made total sense.

Want to further blow your mind?

You can even walk past walls if you could travel across the fourth dimension! Have a look at the following video.

Why bother about the fourth dimension at all?

The world we see with our 3d eyes could be just a facade of the ultimate reality and the truth. We might tell that earth is a sphere but in reality, it is just a cross-section of the actual world out there. You never really know who might be observing us across different dimensions. There are thousands of possibilities, what if this world is just a science project of a higher dimensional college student? We never really know!

Conclusion

It’s creepy yet interesting to think about, and the best part is that it forces us to think beyond our existence in the first place!

I don’t want to give you an existential crisis but clearly, If you compare your life with the big universe out there, you will come to know that the purpose of our life wasn’t just “ not to be eaten by a lion in the planes of Africa” and it isn’t really to get a job at FAANG (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google).

It has a much more deep-rooted meaning that we fail to notice.

This ends yet another blog of mine, hopefully, I was able to explain the fourth dimension in a three-dimensional world, on a two-dimensional screen with my one-dimensional brain (😛)

Hope you enjoyed reading, thank you and have a great day!

Further material to explore more:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesseract#:~:text=In%20geometry%2C%20the%20tesseract%20is,six%20convex%20regular%204%2Dpolytopes.

https://interestingengineering.com/understanding-fourth-dimension-3d-perspective#:~:text=The%20fourth%20dimension%20is%20a,perpendicular%20to%20the%20third%20dimension.&text=In%20order%20to%20better%20understand,are%20being%20made%20between%20each.