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Posted By: Malachai Dec 07, 2001 - 04:20 pm

Lot of people have read Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time. Lot of people first heard about tesseracts from her book. Personally, her novel was what inspired the scifi mania in me. Kind of embarrassed to say, but until recently, I had thought that "tesseract" was just a term the author coined up. Still, I looked it up, but the description was a little foggy. They said it was a three dimensional cube... and yet the model just looked even more 3-d. Would someone be able to tell me in laymens what it is?

Posted By: Krastakin Dec 07, 2001 - 09:55 pm

I looked it up...and it said that it was a FOUR dimentional cube. And I'm assuming, that the fourth dimention is time, like in A Wrinkle in Time.

I'm sure that there's some very complicated scientific explaination for WHY l'engal used the word Tesseract for her book (admittedly, it has been a while since I've read it), maybe she was talking about traveling to that same cube in a different time. The cube would still be the same, but something different would be happening around it? Or perhaps physically moving the cube over time? Does that make any sense?

I don't know...I guess it has something to do with time travel, and when you're talking about time travel, things tend to get extremely complicated.

Good luck hehe

Posted By: Cyrus Feb 04, 2003 - 01:36 pm

I was under the impression that a tesseract was an unfolded four-space-dimensional cube. Basically you can imagine it like this. Takesix blocks and construct a cross out of them. Then take two more cubes and place them on the fron and back (or with a religious reference, where jesus's head would be and on the other side of the cross behind his head). I wish I could find a picture for you, but I haven't got the time.

Posted By: shadow Feb 04, 2003 - 05:22 pm

fairly well explained already...
http://pw1.netcom.com/~hjsmith/WireFrame4/tesseract.html
that's the best model I can find... hard to show something in 2-d that is supposed to exist in 4 dimensions

Posted By: Adam Jan 06, 2004 - 11:20 pm

It is a theoretical construct existing in more than three spacial dimensions. No such dimensions have ever been shown to exist outside of pure hypothesis.