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?