What is the fourth dimension?

While your question may appear simplistic, soliciting simple answers, it is actually quite complex and deserves a proper answer.

It is commonly said in science that we live in a universe of three physical dimensions (vertical motion, horizontal motion, and crosswise motion) which are manifested as space and that time is the fourth dimension. It is with these four coordinates that the location of anything in the universe can be stated.

However, the fourth dimension could be instead yet another direction, one which we do not understand or can not picture easily. The simplest way to explain this strange concept is to consider an imaginary universe that is two-dimensional and to consider the effects that can be produced by having this two-dimensional universe interact with the three-dimensional universe.

It is easily to imagine a two-dimensional universe. An ordinary piece of paper is an excellent example. Draw some figures on it, such as circles. You then imagine these circles as beings that live solely within the piece of paper.

They know two dimensions, crosswise motion and horizontal motion (left/right and forwards/backwards). No other direction is possible to them. And that is all that they know.

Everything is fine and dandy until we curve their universe using the third dimension. Let us say that we make a paper ball, a sphere. The two-dimensional inhabitants still live only in the surface of this new world. They do not see that their universe is curved because light in their universe travels only within that universe, so it curves. Images of far away objects travel relatively unimpeded throughout their two-dimensional universe. They look in a straight line and they can see as far as the eye can see (or resolve).

Everything is wonderful and fine until the day that one of them invents the telescope and looks far away in a straight line; and he sees himself from behind. What is the explanation? Only that his universe is curved positively in a higher dimension; a dimension that is beyond his understanding.

This has not happened to us... yet. It may never happen as it is commonly determined that our universe is flat, that it is not curved in the fourth dimension. It would also be very tricky for us to look so far in a straight line to see ourselves as that which we observe in our telescopes is a record of the past.

In other words, it could be that when we push our telescopes to billions of light-years away, we are looking at ourselves from behind EXCEPT it would be a record of how things were billions of years ago when our sun and Earth were not even formed. It would not look familar at all.

So there you have it, time can be the fourth dimension as far as a co-ordinate system is concerned. A fourth dimension could also be a physical or spatial dimension beyond our own.

We have not even begun to consider the ramifications of dimensions of space beyond a fourth dimension; even though it is often stated that at the Big Bang there may have easily existed over twenty dimensions.

And so little has been released to the general public what the ramifications of additional dimensions of time would be. Yet more than one dimension of time has been considered mathematically in the field of quantum cosmology.

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Excellent question

the first three dimensions are like a glass box (height, width, length, or spatial dimentions because they form space). Let's put a plant inside the box and you take photos of the plant as it grows. You'd have a bunch of photographs of a slowly changing plant. Now suppose you stack that bunch of photos in a pile that's some feet high, now you have the fourth dimension because you can measure the distance between two of the pictures. Now if you had a lot of cameras and did the experiment again and then glued their piles together shrinking and stretching the pictures to make all the pictures taken at the same moment fit each other on every point then you'd get the fourth dimension. Since no one can do that you just say you can and do the math of what would happen if that were possible, that's Einstein's theory of relativity.

Hi there! Of course I had to plead the 5th first(chuckles) When the moon is in the Seventh House And Jupiter aligns with Mars Then peace will guide the planets And love will steer the stars This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius The Age of Aquarius Harmony and understanding Sympathy and trust abounding No more falsehoods or derisions Golden living dreams of visions Mystic crystal revelation And the mind's true liberation BUT I think people don't realize that there is a 2 dimensional rift that obscures the other Dimensions! It is inter dimensionality. Thanks for the Fine Question! .

3 dimensions times Time

3 spacial dimensions, 1 time dimension, the 4 dimensions defined in Relativity Theory

Time is the fourth dimension.

The fourth dimension is time itself.

I claim it is social value. Consider a dime on the table--the zero dimension. A row of dimes on the table-first dimension. A square of dimes-the 2nd dimension. A square of dimes with other dimes stacked on top of each one--the third dimensions. The value of the dimes as determined by society-the fourth dimension. After all a dime is only worth what you can trade it for. QED

Time

Time