Can you explain the Terrasact?

Question

I Just read a wrinkle in time and I am kinda confused. I am studying geometery and it is hard enough for me and the book goes against every thing I have learned. If you could could you include diagrams of 5-D things which are also included in the book. Is there a movie based on the book? It might help me understand it better.

Answer 1

It's a novel, so don't take the ideas in it too seriously. A tesseract is a 4 dimensional cube (see wiki link), and so presumably since we already live in a 3D world plus time T, it takes an extra "5th dimension" for tesseracts to exist. To make this a little easier to follow, imagine that we instead live in 2D-T worlds, like flatlanders, and imagine that there's a multitude of such worlds, adjacent to each other like a sheave or stack of papers. The denizens of each world wouldn't be aware of the other worlds, much less travel between them, even though the worlds may appear to be "next to each other" in the higher dimensional 3D-T space. Imagine that somehow "transcendental beings" have the ability to travel between them, and they do so by "folding spacetime", creating a 3D box connecting two 2D-T worlds. This is actually kind of like the wormhole idea in general relativity, except that in general relativty the wormhole is just a shortcut between one part of spacetime to another.