Discovering Tesseracts

I still haven’t seen Interstellar yet, but here’s a great interview with Kip Thorne about the movie-making process and what he thinks of the final product. (For a very different view, see Phil Plait [update: now partly recanted].)

tesseract One of the things Kip talks about is that the film refers to the concept of a tesseract, which he thought was fun. A tesseract is a four-dimensional version of a cube; you can’t draw it faithfully in two dimensions, but with a little imagination you can get the idea from the picture on the right. Kip mentions that he first heard of the concept of a tesseract in George Gamow’s classic book One, Two, Three… Infinity. Which made me feel momentarily proud, because I remember reading about it there, too — and only later did I find out that many (presumably less sophisticated) people heard of it in Madeleine L’Engle’s equally classic book, A Wrinkle in Time.

But then I caught myself, because (1) it’s stupid to think that reading about something for the first time in a science book rather than a science fantasy is anything to be proud of, and (2) in reality I suspect I first heard about it in Robert Heinlein’s (classic!) short story, “–And He Built a Crooked House.” Which is just as fantastical as L’Engle’s book.

So — where did you first hear the word “tesseract”? A great excuse for a poll! Feel free to elaborate in the comments.

35 Comments

35 thoughts on “Discovering Tesseracts”

  1. “presumably less sophisticated”

    Whatever your thoughts of me and my thoughts of you, you’re funny and I get great enjoyment from it. Keep it up.

  2. I discovered it on my own, using a simple visualization trick I have not seen mentioned anywhere, and proudly named my ‘discovery’ an ‘Octocube’. Alas, a trip to the to the local library set me straight.

    Nonetheless, that experience did alter the course of my life. It was the first time I got a taste of the joy of scientific discovery, and eventually it led to me to take up a formal study of physics, whereas prior to that, I would have never dreamed of doing such a thing.

  3. Sean, I would really like to know what your take is on the recent hype about “Many Interacting Worlds”

  4. Doesn’t Phil Plait get it badly wrong about the planets needing a star? What’s worse is he contradicts himself in his own article. Black Holes are supposed to be the brightest objects in the universe – due to the very accretion disk he shows in the article.

  5. The eight cubic cross sections can be understood as follows:
    a spacelike cube at time T1;
    that cube carried at time T2 where |T2-T1| = the length of an edge of the cube;
    and the worldpaths of each of the six faces of the cube, from T1 to T2.

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