For you to understand a four-dimensional space, which coins the understanding of the four-dimensional universe, we have to review the basis of the three-dimensional space. In 3-dimensional space, you will require to understand three major parameters. These parameters will help you view the universe as three-dimensional and imaginably perceive the exact location of an object.
Three parameters that will take you through a three-dimensional world are length, width, and height. In Physics, it is generally termed as the dimensions of an object in space as mostly taught in your physics tuition in singapore. This sounds complicated already, right. A 4-dimensional space adds a new parameter, which is not comparable to the ones in 3-dimensional and introduces an entirely new perspective to the way you will preserve the universe.
For you to understand this new dimension, try to imagine a fruit juice you have never tasted or rather does not exist assuming that you know and have eaten all fruit juices. Imagine how it would taste like or even its colour. This medium is quite impossible – just as how to picture a 4-dimensional space. To make it practical start from what you can easily digest. The following expose will take you through the world of a three-dimensional universe and unveil the fourth dimension:
The two-dimensional world
Astronomers sometimes say that space is curved, or that the universe is finite but unbounded. Well, imagine that you are perfectly flat, living in a perfectly flat world, or instead you are 2-dimensional in a world with “flat businesses” all over. You have width and length but no height at all.
This being the case, you move left and right but not up or down. You would consider a 3-dimensional object; say dice, as a deviation from normality. If these dice were to land on the 2-dimensional world, only its bottom cross-section area would be seen and realised. Remember that you are visualising yourself as 2-dimensional object viewing a dice that has landed on your 2-dimensional world. You would then know the dice as it descends through the 2-dimensional world as multiple slices of squares.
Three-dimension to four dimension
What about a fourth dimension perspective? To approach this, consider a cube – take two line segments and move it at right angles to its equal length, which will make a square. Move the square in equal length at a right angle to itself, and you will have a cube. Against the light, this cube will cast a shadow. The shadow will appear ordinarily drawn with two squares as their vertices connected. When you view the shadow of a 3-dimensional object in two dimensional, all the lines will appear neither equal nor right angles as the original cube. This is part of losing the course of dimension in a projection.
Now, take the three-dimensional cube and project it in a fourth physical dimension, at all the known directions in 3-dimension, i.e., length, width and height, a phenomenon which most students here like to be tutored on in the h2 physics tuition. Remember to keep the cubes at right angles with each other. It will be hard to imagine this, but you can make it clearer during your H2 Physics tuition practical.
Imagining the four dimension object
A tesseract is impossible to physically view keeping all 4-dimensional parameters intact because you are trapped in a 3-dimensional world. What you can observe, and probably what most astronauts depict for us in diagrams is the shadow of the 4-dimensional object. It will appear as two cubes, one nesting the other and the cubes connected by lines. The real tesseract in 4-dimension would have all the lines in equal length and all the angles being right angles. Since you cannot imagine the 4-dimensional object, you can think about it perfectly well. Tutors mostly teach tesseracts properties in A-level physics tuition and help learners simplify the concepts.
From “flatland” to a four-dimensional universe
Now, imagine a universe just like “flatland,” truly two dimensional and entirely flat in all directions but with one exception, unannounced to its inhabitants. 2-dimension universes can be curved by great gravitational forces, to a third physical dimension, maybe into a sphere or anything beyond that experience.
Locally, the world looks fair enough, but if you take a long straight walk through what seems to be a straight line, you will uncover a great mystery. If you had marked your starting point, never turning around or reaching an edge, you would come back at exactly your starting position. You could not imagine this 3-dimension world, but you have undoubtedly deduced it. Increasing all the dimensions by one, then you will have a situation like the one most cosmologists consider four-dimensional.
We are three-dimensional creatures trapped in a three-dimensional world, but maybe it is curved. Well, now you can talk about a 4-dimensional universe, but cannot experience it without looking at the universe beyond your two or three-dimensional world. Enrolling in Physics tuition Singapore will help you widen your thinking and create challenging scenarios that will make you think of the fourth dimension, not just as an abstract phenomenon but also as something practical.
