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To: JenB
Either way, I may go psycho...

Be sure to pack a lunch and take lots of pictures.

9,516 posted on 06/17/2002 3:13:17 PM PDT by Corin Stormhands
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To: Corin Stormhands; 2Jedismom
I didn't go psycho, thanks to large amounts of chocolate and a very old collection of stories, including a Heinlein I've never read. Guess what! There is such a thing as a tesseract! I mean, Heinlein at least used it about sixty years ago, in his ...And he built a crooked house. It's complicated - geometry time! Imagine a point, that's sort of the representation of something with no dimensions, ok? Now, a line is sort of a squared point - it has one dimension, length. A plane, or a squared line, has two dimensions - length and width. Square the plane, and you get a cube, which has a third dimension, depth.

Now, if you square that cube, what you get is a three-dimensional representation of a four-dimensional object - a tesseract. It has eight (I think) cubes, all sharing sides and is probably impossible to picture. If it were really four-dimensional, it would look - to us - like a cube, the fourth dimensional aspect being that all eight cubes occupy the same space. Only not exactly. But it would really mess with space and time, as the short story admirably demonstrated (one man chases himself around a four-dimensional house, which folds itself entirely into four dimensions and vanishes somewhere with a pop, leaving the characters stranded miles from their starting place. He explains things much better, find the story if you're interested.)

Anyway, I'm back.... so, what did you do today?

9,517 posted on 06/17/2002 3:41:27 PM PDT by JenB
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