Stepping into the Fourth Dimension :: Mathematics Dimensions Geometry Essays

Stepping into the Fourth Dimension   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Imagine going to a magic show, where the world’s top ranked magicians gather to dazzle their wide-eyed crowd. Some would walk through jet turbines, others would decapitate their assistants only to fuse them back together, and others would transform pearls into tigers. However, with each of these seemingly impossible stunts, there is always a catch. A curtain will fall momentarily; a door will shut; the lights will go out; a large cloud of smoke will fill the room, or a screen will hide what is truly going on. Then, a very different magician comes on, and performs stunts like entering a closed box without opening any doors, and placing a mouse in a sealed bottle without removing the cork. These do not seem very extravagant compared to the amazing feats other magicians pull off, but what leaves the crowd completely baffled is the fact that he does these tricks without placing a handkerchief over his hand, or doing it so fast the crowd misses what is going on. To perform the mouse-in-the-bottle trick, he shows the mouse in his hand, slowly twists it in a strange manner, and right before your eyes, his hand completely disappears! A few instants later his hand reappears inside the bottle, holding the mouse. There seem to be two parts of his arm; one in the bottle, and one out. His arm looks severed, yet he has complete control of his fingers inside the bottle. The hand lets go of the mouse, and again vanishes from inside the bottle, and reconstitutes itself on the magicians arm. He pulled it off candidly, without the smoke and mirrors. Everything that was seen actually happened. This magician, breaking the tradition of fooling the audience with illusions, used cutting edge knowledge of higher-dimensional science to perform this marvel. He sent his arm outside of 3-D space, twisted it in the fourth dimension, and placed it back into the bottle. The fourth dimension is not time, but an extra direction, just like left, right, up, down, forward, and backwards. This magician has used the fourth dimension for entertainment purposes. However, the fourth dimension has other, more practical uses and applications in the realm of mathematics, geometry, as well as astrophysics, and holds the explanation to such natural phenomena as gravity and electromagnetism.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  To this day, many scientists and other people accept time as being the fourth dimension. This notion is completely absurd. Time does play an important role in the description of an object, but it is incorrect to perceive it as a dimension.