That, according to string theory, is the possible “size” of the 4th dimension.
I’ve always felt all my life I was grasping at some intangible straw in my mind. Trying to capture some elusive truth, some kind of undefinable knowledge that was always just beyond the tip of my tongue. Like trying to catch a butterfly that is always more than an arm’s length away. It has informed much of my writing, this intense, frustrating desire to think in new ways, to picture the unpicturable, to imagine the unimaginable.
Sometimes the feeling has been extremely disconcerting, almost terrifying. A mind trying to expand beyond a cage ill suited to hold it. I think maybe sometimes a part of it overlaps with the void beyond the cage, capturing glimpses of things so far beyond human comprehension it doesn’t even retain them. I don’t know what it’s like beyond the cage, I just know the feeling of entrapment when I am crammed back into it.
Draw a stick figure on a piece of paper. That paper is his entire world. It’s all he knows. He is a 2 dimensional being, thinking and perceiving in such limited ways. Maybe to him, his paper world seems endless. To us it’s 30/20cm. How many of his entire universe could we stack up high just on a desk? How many could fill our entire universe?
Now, imagine we are the limited beings, and we are being observed by a 4th dimensional being. Our universe, full of trillions of galaxies each filled with billions of stars, is just a slip of paper on his desk. Imagine how much more there could be to explore? To learn about? And they don’t even have to be universes as we know them.
Realities without space, where the concept of shape or form is meaningless. Worlds where time functions as space, and matter as energy. Worlds where the hypothetical is indistinguishable from the practical. Spiraling fractal halls connecting a lattice of probabilities without integer. Timeless voids in which all matter and energy are fizzing with overlapping multitudes of potential, everything happening all at once, all forms equally actualized and unactualized. A world where the outside walls of reality are connected to the inside, a changeless state that to our limited minds would appear to be perpetually shifting as we try to comprehend the angles like thinking through a kaleidoscope.
And in reality, while we think of ourselves as these big, clever 3D beings, especially relative to Bob, did you know we don’t even actually perceive in 3 dimensions? Think about it. You don’t see a 3D environment, you see a 2D screen projecting a singular vantage point of that environment into your mind. Having two eyes allows us to *calculate* the depth, but we don’t really see it. We can’t even properly perceive our own 3 dimensional existence, and here I am pining for something infinitely more complex. Just out of reach...
If there is a fourth spatial dimension, they say its “size” is only about 0.01mm. This does not refer to the volume of whatever environments it may contain. Think of it more like… the distance you would have to travel to get there. Like our stick figure friend. Let’s call him Bob. We look down at the page and see how Bob is resting on its surface, a mere fraction away from our 3D world. Just turn! We scream at him. Bob looks left, he looks right. He looks up, he looks down.
He has now exhausted all “directions” he can look in, and doesn't see us. We yell at him to look BACK, to look FORTH, and he doesn’t understand what we are saying. Though it seems so obvious to us, depth is the privy of 3 dimensional beings. He can’t even comprehend it. To him, the sum total of available directions to look in are up, down, left, right. We’re standing right next to him and he can’t see us. We could tap on his shoulder, but he can never look around.
So too is it for us. If such a higher realm exists, we can’t see the way to move to get there. 4D Bob says “Just turn around!” We look up, we look down, we look left and right, we look back and forth. “Just look upside-in!” He shouts. We look puzzled. There are no other directions to look in. We can run in a perfect circle. See? All directions covered! But then, 2D Bob can run in a circle too, albeit a flat one. It’s frustrating, isn’t it? Even if we KNOW there is another way to move in, that 4D Bob could be close enough to breathe on our shoulders, we can’t turn in the right direction to see him.
And what infuriates me is I almost feel like I can grasp it. Just the shadow. The silhouette of eternity, flitting away from my fingers the moment I reach for it. It’s haunting to know there is a boundary you can never cross, even if the door is wide open for you. If I could just… turn. But I don’t know how. I can never know how. Even if I could know, I couldn’t do it. Even if I could do it, it would kill me. The ink cannot hold its shape without the paper. I will be forever barred from leaving its edge.
0.01 milimeters. If it exists, that’s how far away it is. A world as infinitely larger than ours as ours is from a slip of paper. There’s no way to really know if it exists yet, but I long to experience it. And I hate knowing that I can try like hell all my life to expand my mind and try to grasp it, and I will never so much as lift my head from the page. Though, truthfully, I think it isn’t the fact that I will never get there that drives me mad. It’s the fact that I know when my time finally comes, no matter how far I am from attaining it, my body will drop right at the gate.
Here lies Founder. He died chasing butterflies. Half a step away from infinity.
