Media
Before watching this video, think what a 1D, 2D, and 3D object look like. Now try to imagine a 4D object.
Carl Sagan: Flatland Animated (4:22)
Science ABC – What Exactly is a Tesseract? (Hint: Not a Superhero Stone) (3:13)
It is very hard to imagine what a 4D cube (tesseract) would look like, because we are limited to 3D reality. This video attempts to describe how a tesseract can be unfolded from 4D to 3D, much like a cube can be unfolded from a 3D cube to a 2D net.
Vladimir Panfilov – Unwrapping a tesseract (4d cube aka hypercube) (1:38)
Michio Kaku is a professor of theoretical physics at the City University of New York (CUNY).
Big Think – Michio Kaku: The Multiverse Has 11 Dimensions (2:24)
Kurt Vonnegut – Slaughterhouse 5
There was a lot that Billy said that was gibberish to the Tralfamadorians, too. They couldn’t imagine what time looked like to him. Billy had given up on explaining that. The guide outside had to explain as best he could.
The guide invited the crowd to imagine that they were looking across a desert at a mountain range on a day that was twinkling bright and clear. They could look at a peak or a bird or a cloud, at a stone right in front of them, or even down into a canyon behind them. But among them was this poor Earthling, and his head was encased in a steel sphere which he could never take off. There was only one eyehole through which he could look, and welded to that eyehole were six feet of pipe.
This was only the beginning of Billy’s miseries in the metaphor. He was also strapped to a steel lattice which was bolted to a flatcar on rails, And there was no way he could turn his head or touch the pipe. The far end of the pipe rested on a bi-pod which was also bolted to the flatcar. All Billy could see was the dot at the end of the pipe. He didn’t know he was on a flatcar, didn’t even know there was anything peculiar about his situation.
The flatcar sometimes crept, sometimes went extremely fast, often stopped-went uphill, downhill, around curves, along straightaways. Whatever poor Billy saw through the pipe, he had no choice but to say to himself, ‘That’s life.’
Billy expected the Tralfamadorians to be baffled and alarmed by all the wars and other forms of murder on Earth. He expected them to fear that the Earthling combination of ferocity and spectacular weaponry might eventually destroy part or maybe all of the innocent Universe. Science fiction had led him to expect that.
But the subject of war never came up until Billy brought it up himself. Somebody in the zoo crowd asked him through the lecturer what the most valuable thing he had learned on Tralfamadore was so far, and Billy replied, ‘How the inhabitants of a whole planet can live in peace I As you know, I am from a planet that has been engaged in senseless slaughter since the beginning of time. I myself have seen the bodies of schoolgirls who were boiled alive in a water tower by my own countrymen, who were proud of fighting pure evil at the time. ‘ This was true. Billy saw the boiled bodies in Dresden. ‘And I have lit my way in a prison at night with candles from the fat of human beings who were butchered by the brothers and fathers of those school girls who were boiled. Earthlings must be the terrors of the Universe! If other planets aren’t now in danger from Earth, they soon will be. So tell me the secret so I can take it back to Earth and save us all: How can a planet live at peace?’
Billy felt that he had spoken soaringly. He was baffled when he saw the Tralfamadorians close their little hands on their eyes. He knew from past experience what this meant: He was being stupid.
‘Would-would you mind telling me,’ he said to the guide, much deflated, ‘what was so stupid about that?’
‘We know how the Universe ends,’ said the guide, ‘and Earth has nothing to do with it, except that it gets wiped out, too.’
‘How-how does the Universe end?’ said Billy.
‘We blow it up, experimenting with new fuels for our flying saucers. A Tralfamadorian test pilot presses a starter button, and the whole Universe disappears.’ So it goes.
“If You know this,” said Billy, ‘isn’t there some way you can prevent it? Can’t you keep the pilot from pressing the button?’
‘He has always pressed it, and he always will. We always let him and we always will let him. The moment is structured that way.’
‘So,’ said Billy gropingly, I suppose that the idea of, preventing war on Earth is stupid, too. ‘
‘Of course.’
‘But you do have a peaceful planet here.’
‘Today we do. On other days we have wars as horrible as any you’ve ever seen or read about. There isn’t anything we can do about them, so we simply don’t look at them. We ignore them. We spend eternity looking at pleasant moments-like today at the zoo. Isn’t this a nice moment?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s one thing Earthlings might learn to do, if they tried hard enough: Ignore the awful times, and concentrate on the good ones.’
‘Um,’ said Billy Pilgrim.