Sushi, Ice Cream and The Fourth Dimension
We had dinner last night with two of my cousins, a freshman in high school and a NYU student. Dinner was sushi from the western burbs' finest Japanese restaurant, Yokohama, and ice cream at my first employer - Baskin Robbins. As we caught up over sushi and later ice cream, we had one of the more interesting dinner discussions I've had in a long time. As it turns out, completely independent of one another, my cousins share a recent intellectual pursuit: the fourth dimension.
If you're shaking your head you're having the same reaction I did when the discussion first came up. As they articulated their thoughts on tesseracts, dimensional folding and Carl Sagan I found myself more and more interested. Despite the fact that the concepts they were describing were "out there," each used logical and informed descriptions to teach my wife and I. Little is known about the fourth dimension, but it involves logic gathered from the relationship between the third dimension (the one in which we live) and the second dimension (often referred to by scientists and mathematicians as "Flatland").
The basic logic is that in the third dimension objects have shadows which are 2D. The theories suggest that an object in the fourth dimension would cast shadows which are 3D. Shadows are cast in a dimension below the one in which the observer exists. Because we have no way of knowing what something looks like in 4D, the furthest that scientists have come is to show what the shadow of a 4D object would look like. It gets more and more complicated, but some of the videos below really do a good job of explaining the fourth dimension in a way that sort of makes sense. No doubt it's heavy, purely conceptual thought - but it's fascinating.
Carl Sagan Fourth Dimension Explanation
Fourth Spatial Dimension 101
