Texas State Capitol

It's like I want a new language after seeing Leo Kottke perform because the one I got is never adequate.

What is this?
During winter, it was most blatant. The pale greening of spring has gracefully softened the appearance of the trees that have survived.

Imagine being a baby chick, growing and developing within an eggshell. The first part of your life, you are not fully formed, not aware. Your body is expanding and unfolding from the zygote formed by the union of a sperm with the egg. As you grow, there's a point where your body is complete, and you spend the hours of a day, restless, pecking and tapping at the wall surrounding you. The shell develops fractures, but still there is no breakthrough. You have this yearning to continue, to seek something beyond the small boundaries of your shell.

Now imagine the shell has broken. What would that first rush of light and fresh air be like? What is it like to have the edge of your whole world only half an inch from your face, and then suddenly to discover the next world expands outward without limits?

My kids received one of those ant farms as a gift. It's a flat clear plastic case. As the ants build their tunnels, you can watch their movement because the walls are pressed so close together, there's not room for the tunnels to to go anywhere but up and down. It's almost like a two dimensional house.

At some point the kids got bored with their farm, so we took the ants outside to release them. The ants were functioning fine within the confines of the artificial farm, but once released they were very confused, and not just about new territory. They stumbled about, and seemed completely disoriented. They had walked up and down all their lives. They knew nothing about walking outward.

Unconstrained by higher level physics and math training(ahem!), I like to imagine the dimension of time is spatial, and that although our bodies experience the time dimension only as 'now', one point on the timeline, time actually exists physically in its entirety. In other words, that the past exists, and the future exists, just as the beginning and end of a movie reel exist even when we're watching the middle of the film. They don't disappear. It's our body experience that is limited, not the dimension itself.

If you're trying to broaden your understanding about dimensions, one of the first little roadblocks to be aware of is semantics regarding the 4th dimension. The first three dimensions roughly translate into width, height, and depth (both in physics and math). The fourth dimension in physics is time, referred to in theories regarding the spacetime continuum (for example, Einstein's theories). From what I can tell, in physics, some don't even call it the 4th dimension because it is not considered to be a spatial dimension. So in physics, there are the three spatial dimensions and the time dimension.

There is mathematical evidence of a 4th spatial, or Euclidian, dimension (and more).(Models of tesseracts and hyperspheres are attempts to illustrate the 4th spatial dimension in ways we can grasp from our 3-D perspective.) Additional dimensions are also hypothesized in physics theories such as string theory (10 dimensions) and M-theory (11 dimensions).

So the term 4th dimension can refer either to time, or a 4th spatial dimension, and it's important to know which is being discussed.

Flatland was written by Edwin A. Abbott, and published in 1884. Abbott develops a thinner-than-paper world that exists in only two dimensions. He describes the hierarchy within that world, and some of its societal challenges. He then introduces a three-dimensional character, like you and me. The 3-D fellow can easily see the two-D people, but it is very hard for the 2-D people to conceive the full reality of the 3-D character. The book goes on to apply that concept to how 3-D people like us would experience meeting 4-D beings. (In short - very uncomfortably!)

I was happy to find tonight a youtube link to Carl Sagan demonstrating the Flatlander meeting a 3-D apple.