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Four-dimensional space

Four-dimensional space (4D) is the mathematical extension of the concept of three-dimensional space (3D). Three-dimensional space is the simplest possible abstraction of the observation that one needs only three numbers, called dimensions, to describe the sizes or locations of objects in the everyday world. For example, the volume of a rectangular box is found by measuring and multiplying its length, width, and height (often labeled x, y, and z). This concept of ordinary space is called Euclidean space because it corresponds to Euclid's geometry, which was originally abstracted from the spatial experiences of everyday life.


The idea of adding a fourth dimension appears in Jean le Rond d'Alembert's "Dimensions". published in 1754, but the mathematics of more than three dimensions only emerged in the 19th century. The general concept of Euclidean space with any number of dimensions was fully developed by the Swiss mathematician Ludwig Schläfli before 1853. Schläfli's work received little attention during his lifetime and was published only posthumously, in 1901, but meanwhile the fourth Euclidean dimension was rediscovered by others. In 1880 Charles Howard Hinton popularized it in an essay, "What is the Fourth Dimension?", in which he explained the concept of a "four-dimensional cube" with a step-by-step generalization of the properties of lines, squares, and cubes. The simplest form of Hinton's method is to draw two ordinary 3D cubes in 2D space, one encompassing the other, separated by an "unseen" distance, and then draw lines between their equivalent vertices. This can be seen in the accompanying animation whenever it shows a smaller inner cube inside a larger outer cube. The eight lines connecting the vertices of the two cubes in this case represent a single direction in the "unseen" fourth dimension.

Higher-dimensional spaces (greater than three) have since become one of the foundations for formally expressing modern mathematics and physics. Large parts of these topics could not exist in their current forms without using such spaces. Einstein's theory of relativity is formulated in 4D space, although not in a Euclidean 4D space. Einstein's concept of spacetime has a Minkowski structure based on a non-Euclidean geometry with three spatial dimensions and one temporal dimension, rather than the four symmetric spatial dimensions of Schläfli's Euclidean 4D space.

Single locations in Euclidean 4D space can be given as vectors or n-tuples, i.e., as ordered lists of numbers such as (x, y, z, w). It is only when such locations are linked together into more complicated shapes that the full richness and geometric complexity of higher-dimensional spaces emerge. A hint of that complexity can be seen in the accompanying 2D animation of one of the simplest possible regular 4D objects, the tesseract, which is analogous to the 3D cube.

History

Lagrange wrote in his Mécanique analytique (published 1788, based on work done around 1755) that mechanics can be viewed as operating in a four-dimensional space— three dimensions of space, and one of time. As early as 1827, Möbius realized that a fourth spatial dimension would allow a three-dimensional form to be rotated onto its mirror-image. The general concept of Euclidean space with any number of dimensions was fully developed by the Swiss mathematician Ludwig Schläfli in the mid-19th century, at a time when Cayley, Grassman and Möbius were the only other people who had ever conceived the possibility of geometry in more than three dimensions. By 1853 Schläfli had discovered all the regular polytopes that exist in higher dimensions, including the four-dimensional analogs of the Platonic solids.

An arithmetic of four spatial dimensions, called quaternions, was defined by William Rowan Hamilton in 1843. This associative algebra was the source of the science of vector analysis in three dimensions as recounted by Michael J. Crowe in A History of Vector Analysis. Soon after, tessarines and coquaternions were introduced as other four-dimensional algebras over R. In 1878 William Kingdon Clifford introduced what is now termed geometric algebra, unifying Hamilton's quaternions with Hermann Grassmann's algebra and revealing the geometric nature of these systems, especially in four dimensions. The operations of geometric algebra have the effect of mirroring, rotating, translating, and mapping the geometric objects that are being modeled to new positions. In 1886, Victor Schlegel described his method of visualizing four-dimensional objects with Schlegel diagrams.

One of the first popular expositors of the fourth dimension was Charles Howard Hinton, starting in 1880 with his essay What is the Fourth Dimension?, published in the Dublin University magazine. He coined the terms tesseract, ana and kata in his book A New Era of Thought and introduced a method for visualizing the fourth dimension using cubes in the book Fourth Dimension. Hinton's ideas inspired a fantasy about a "Church of the Fourth Dimension" featured by Martin Gardner in his January 1962 "Mathematical Games column" in Scientific American.

Higher dimensional non-Euclidean spaces were put on a firm footing by Bernhard Riemann's 1854 thesis, Über die Hypothesen welche der Geometrie zu Grunde liegen, in which he considered a "point" to be any sequence of coordinates (x1, ..., xn). In 1908, Hermann Minkowski presented a paper consolidating the role of time as the fourth dimension of spacetime, the basis for Einstein's theories of special and general relativity. But the geometry of spacetime, being non-Euclidean, is profoundly different from that explored by Schläfli and popularised by Hinton. The study of Minkowski space required Riemann's mathematics which is quite different from that of four-dimensional Euclidean space, and so developed along quite different lines. This separation was less clear in the popular imagination, with works of fiction and philosophy blurring the distinction, so in 1973 H. S. M. Coxeter felt compelled to write:

Little, if anything, is gained by representing the fourth Euclidean dimension as time. In fact, this idea, so attractively developed by H. G. Wells in The Time Machine, has led such authors as John William Dunne (An Experiment with Time) into a serious misconception of the theory of Relativity. Minkowski's geometry of space-time is not Euclidean, and consequently has no connection with the present investigation.

— H. S. M. Coxeter, Regular Polytopes

Visual scope

People have a spatial self-perception as beings in a three-dimensional space, but are visually restricted to one dimension less: the eye sees the world as a projection to two dimensions, on the surface of the retina. Assuming a four-dimensional being were able to see the world in projections to a hypersurface, also just one dimension less, i.e., to three dimensions, it would be able to see, e.g., all six faces of an opaque box simultaneously, and in fact, what is inside the box at the same time, just as people can see all four sides and simultaneously the interior of a rectangle on a piece of paper.[citation needed] The being would be able to discern all points in a 3-dimensional subspace simultaneously, including the inner structure of solid 3-dimensional objects, things obscured from human viewpoints in three dimensions on two-dimensional projections. Brains receive images in two dimensions and use reasoning to help picture three-dimensional objects.

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