The Fourth Dimension Theory. What Mysterious Finds Would We Find?

The human eyes can only see in two dimensions. It is our brains that transform the picture we see into three dimensions. Imagine a cardboard box in front of you. If you were to take a picture with your phone, you would have the same view your eyes do. A picture is nothing more than a 2-dimensional object representing the 3-dimensional world where we live. What if there is a fourth dimension and we can’t see or understand it?

If you are unfamiliar with dimensions, imagine them like directions. In our world, we can move along three lines – Forward/Back, Left/Right, and Up/Down. When we look at an image, we can’t go up or down through it. Therefore, it is only 2-dimensions. What happens, however, if there is a way to go through our world as we know it? That would be the 4th dimension.

Before we can travel, we must first understand the 4th dimension. It is not an easy subject. I highly recommend watching Carl Sagan’s explanation of it. It is wonderfully crafted. The video is approximately seven minutes long, but I will also summarize the key points.

Carl explains it best from the world of 2-dimensions. Imagine you are just a square on a piece of paper. The universe would be that piece of paper. You know you can move forward, backward, or to the sides. However, you cannot point up or down.

Along comes a 3-dimensional being ready to enter the universe of “flat-land”. You, a square living peacefully, enter your home and hear a booming voice echoing around you. It speaks “Hello.” To make matters worse for you, this voice speaks to the inside of your body. You become frightened and confused. The being decides to enter your home from above, a place you cannot see. You would see a thin slice representing the shape of the being. Then, the being floats underneath you and sends you to the third dimension.

With you being paper-thin, you would float in the 3d universe. You would see things unimaginable until you land. It very well could be your same universe. Your friends in “flat-land” would see you materialize out of thin air. The only explanation they could come up with is you teleported from your house to here.

Picture the open cardboard box again. You are looking at it from the side and cannot know what is inside because we cannot see in 3D. If we looked at a 2-dimensional square, we could see everything inside it. So a 4-dimensional being would see inside the cardboard box and simultaneously inside us. We would not be able to see this being as it exists in a dimension where we cannot point.

If the entity is to enter our 3-dimensional universe, we would only be able to make out a 3d shape that consistently changes as it moves through. Imagine a blurry ghost lighting up at different moments. Finally, if the being lifted us into their dimension, we would not understand what we see there. If the being places us back in our universe, we may have even teleported miles from home.

We have no scientific way, currently, of verifying the fourth dimension exists. There may be no such thing. It is also possible that it does exist. Perhaps we don’t have the education needed to prove it. Also, there is no way of disproving it exists.

Some scientists believe our universe may be a giant bubble that consistently expands. Again, this is another theory that is not possible to prove. We can only see 46.5 billion light-years away. The reason being we must wait for the light to reach us. Light is not instantaneous. It does move at a specific speed. Because of this, what we see through a telescope is actually from the past, not the present.

Bonus Wisdom: The sun we see today is 8 minutes from the past.

If we live in a bubble, the fourth dimension would exist outside of it.

Imagine being able to travel through the bubble and into the fourth dimension. Your brain would not be able to understand a lot outside of the 3d bubble. It would be like going to a house of mirrors attraction, except objects would be changing. A simple cube is shown below (called a Tesseract in 4d). It is just a 3d shadow of what it would look like if it was rotating, not the physical 4d object.

Assuming our bodies could survive that dimension, we could travel back to our universe at a different location. It would be a form of teleportation.

We could also find other 3-dimensional bubbles out there and travel there. It would be a form of universe hopping. Parallel universes, a Multiverse, can be further imagined.