THE FOURTH DIMENSION SIMPLY EXPLAINED

79

boundaries of a three-dimensional body are two-dimensional. "Do three-dimensional bodies bound anything?" Or again, he noticed that if b is the length of the side of a square, then b represents its area, and b the volume of the cube with edge equal to b. "What does b4 represent? Are there four-dimensional bodies?" In trying to imagine a four-dimensional thing, the student turned back, and tried to see how three dimensions would appear to a person who knew only two dimensions. He imagined a race of beings endowed with all the faculties of any rational being except that they have but two dimensions and live in a two-dimensional region, say a plane. We might think of these people as the shadows of three-dimensional beings. In their language there are no such words as "up" or "down," "high" or "low." They can see nothing lying outside of the plane in which they live. They can move in any direction in the plane, but have no conception of any movement which will carry them out of the plane. Life in such a region would be under conditions quite different from life in three-dimensional space. A house for such beings may be simply a series of rectangles. A
Page 156 shadow being is just as safe from observation behind a line as a three-dimensional being behind a wall. A bank safe might consist of simply a circle. It would have to be very large, however, for there is no piling up of money in this country. If we imagine a piece of two-dimensional rope, we will see that it is impossible for the shadow beings to tie the two ends together in a knot, even if they had the slightest notion of a knot.

If a schoolboy in shadow land wished to prove that the corresponding angles of the two triangles in Fig. 1 are equal because the corresponding sides are equal, he would perhaps show that each triangle could be moved

Figures 1 and 2
over until the vertices occupied the positions A"B"C" . He could not place one triangle on the other, for he has no conception of such a thing. If the triangles were as shown in Fig. 2, the schoolboy could not use the sliding method of proof, for no amount of sliding could make the points ABC coincide with A"B"C" . He might, however, conceive of the sides AB and BC to be made of some flexible cord, and the point B pushed
Page 157 along the line BB' until the cord again became taut, and then the triangle AB'C could be pushed into the position A"B"C".

In working with this problem, he might have imagined two one-dimensional objects in a onedimensional region with the fixed points ABC , and A'B'C', respectively

Get any book for free on: www.Abika.com