Nevergirl’s

I know I talk about really shallow things (hello food, clothes, friends, hair loss treatment and the like) but every now and then, I also trance out over the metaphysical: the concept of wrinkles in the fabric of time, for instance.

Let’s see if I can explain this thing without bungling it up.

There are five dimensions: the first, line; the second, shape; and the third, space. The fourth is time; and when you place a thing – anything, be it an object or a person – within a continuum, you give it a history and a destiny. The fifth dimension – and this is where it gets interesting – is called a tesseract, often popularly called a hypercube.

In her novel A Wrinkle in Time, Madeline L’Engle had Meg Murry and her companions walk in and out of planets and dimensions using a tesseract. In the television series, Andromeda, tesseract generators can manipulate space, but must be used with caution because they interfere with time.

It’s a simple idea, really, and one that is breathtaking for precisely this reason. You select two points in the space-time continuum. You “fold” the line between them so that the points, rather than being at opposite ends, now touch each other. You cut a hole through the fold so that you can pass through. This hole is the tesseract, literally your wrinkle in the fabric of time.

Isn’t Physics beautiful?

This entry was posted on Friday, February 5th, 2010 at 2:10 am and is filed under Blathers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.