{"id":12256,"date":"2014-11-07T08:03:34","date_gmt":"2014-11-07T16:03:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/?p=12256"},"modified":"2014-11-09T08:32:11","modified_gmt":"2014-11-09T16:32:11","slug":"discovering-tesseracts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2014\/11\/07\/discovering-tesseracts\/","title":{"rendered":"Discovering Tesseracts"},"content":{"rendered":"

I still haven’t seen Interstellar<\/a><\/em> yet, but here’s a great interview with Kip Thorne<\/a> about the movie-making process and what he thinks of the final product. (For a very different view, see Phil Plait<\/a> [update<\/strong>: now partly recanted<\/a>].) <\/p>\n

\"tesseract\" One of the things Kip talks about is that the film refers to the concept of a tesseract, which he thought was fun. A tesseract is a four-dimensional version of a cube; you can’t draw it faithfully in two dimensions, but with a little imagination you can get the idea from the picture on the right. Kip mentions that he first heard of the concept of a tesseract in George Gamow’s classic book One, Two, Three… Infinity<\/em><\/a>. Which made me feel momentarily proud, because I remember reading about it there, too — and only later did I find out that many (presumably less sophisticated) people heard of it in Madeleine L’Engle’s equally classic book, A Wrinkle in Time<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

But then I caught myself, because (1) it’s stupid to think that reading about something for the first time in a science book rather than a science fantasy is anything to be proud of, and (2) in reality I suspect I first heard about it in Robert Heinlein’s (classic!) short story, “–And He Built a Crooked House.”<\/a> Which is just as fantastical as L’Engle’s book.<\/p>\n

So — where did you first hear the word “tesseract”? A great excuse for a poll! Feel free to elaborate in the comments.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I still haven’t seen Interstellar yet, but here’s a great interview with Kip Thorne about the movie-making process and what he thinks of the final product. (For a very different view, see Phil Plait [update: now partly recanted].) One of the things Kip talks about is that the film refers to the concept of a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,35,37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12256","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-math","category-time","category-words"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12256","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12256"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12256\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12262,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12256\/revisions\/12262"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12256"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12256"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12256"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}