We all know we live in three-dimensional space. But what does it mean when people talk about four dimensions?
Is it just a bigger kind of space? Is it “space-time,” the popular idea which emerged from Einstein’s theory of relativity?
If you have wondered what four dimensions really look like, you may have come across drawings of a “four-dimensional cube.” But our brains are wired to interpret drawings on flat paper as two- or at most three-dimensional, not four-dimensional.
The almost insurmountable difficulty of visualizing the fourth dimension has inspired mathematicians, physicists, writers, and even some artists for centuries. But even if we can’t quite imagine it, we can understand it.
What is dimension?
The dimension of a space captures the number of independent directions in it.
A line is one-dimensional. We can move along it forward and backward, but these are opposite, not independent, directions. You can also think of a string or piece of rope as practically one-dimensional, as the thickness is negligible compared with the length.
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