The Dimensions Above

We can’t see the fourth dimension. Or rather, we can only ever see really thin cross sections of it, as if some evil genius has dissected time and is showing us one little bit after the next. It’s a bit like a picture show (aka a movie) in which the pictures themselves aren’t really changing, but we perceive change because what is changing is which picture we see. If we could see all of time, we would realise that everything is completely static.

But wait, let me explain by way of an analogy. Imagine that we live in a two dimensional world. There is width and there is depth, but there’s no (real) height. It’s the world of a piece of paper. Just like our three dimensional world things can exist there. We can have squares, circles and even triangles (yey).

But now imagine a stack of papers and we cut a cone shape out of the middle of them. For those of you who can’t quite remember what a cone looks like, it’s like a tube with a point at one end, which slowly expands to a wide base at the other. So, we’ve got our pile of papers with a three dimensional shape cut into it. Now let’s imagine that the point starts at the top of the pile and the base of the cone is at the bottom. Then imagine that you start to pull a sheet at a time away. As you pull each sheet away the circle will appear to grow. Of course the circle isn’t growing, you’re just moving through the pile of sheets.

The fourth dimension is pretty much exactly the same, except (of course) that there happens to be another dimension below. If you could actually see it, things might be slightly odd. You wouldn’t just see your current self, but you’d also see your future and past self. I think Rob Bryanton said it best when he said,

“If you could see yourself in the fourth dimension you'd be like a long undulating snake, with your embryonic self on one end and your deceased self at the other”

The problem, of course, is that suddenly reality would become static again. You see, we’d be stuck on a line, with nowhere to go. Time, in and of it self, is linear. That’s quite understandable, really, just as width is one dimension, so time is only one dimensional. That means that you can’t go left, or right, up or down. You can only go forward (and possibly not even backwards, but that’s part of another story). What is ahead of you on that road will remain in front of you on the road.

Except, of course, if there’s a fifth dimension. Call it time squared, if you will, or time². Suddenly there is again space for movement left and right. Situations can be avoided and, what is more, there is suddenly a way to avoid those frustrating paradoxes that always confound time travel discussions. ‘What if you go back and kill your father’. Well, then you’re just moving the time line that you’re in off to the left a bit and you end up moving in a different direction.

Another great thing, of course, is that with the fifth dimension those that could see the fourth dimension in its entirety would not be seeing stasis. After all, the fifth dimension could then introduce the change required.

The question then becomes, of course, but what if you can fully see the fifth dimension?