• Question: What is a tesseract and does it appear in the 100th dimension?

    Asked by for_science_john to Laura, Matthew, Andrew on 20 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Andrew McKinley

      Andrew McKinley answered on 20 Nov 2014:

      I’d need to revise my Avengers history! Is it not a power source?

      String theory at present makes use of 11 dimensions, but I’m not aware of physicists needing any more than this to explain behaviours of other dimensions (though i understand mathematicians regularly use 100s of dimensions!)
      The trick is how do we visualise these dimensions…

      The tesseract is however a construct from science fiction. Wouldn’t it be cool if it did exist though?

    • Photo: Matthew Camilleri

      Matthew Camilleri answered on 20 Nov 2014:

      A tesseract is actually a word describing 2 boxes, 1 inside the other, also known as a hypercube.

      Now, that is the boring answer forgetting it was ever used in Marvel. In Marvel they had a tesseract that was a cosmic cube that could make any wish a reality, even if these broke the rules of magic, without considering the consequences of such wishes.

      The probability is that if we were to have 100 dimensions then you would be able to do anything you want, and you can dream of.

      As far as I am concerned we only have 4 dimensions, length, width height and time, although physicists do use more in order to suit there equations. Probably if we ever find parallel universes that could be the 5th dimension, and who knows what new possibilities that would lead to.

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