Those catch-my-breath moments when I see or hear for the first time
things that makes me stop, step back and simply go into a
wow-filled silence.

This is a painting I have always held in awe.
I have looked at it many times, feeling there was more to it,
with the feeling that I was on the verge of an elusive understanding…

Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus) was painted in 1954 by Salvador Dalí,
and depicts the crucified Jesus upon the net of a hypercube.
Gala (Dalí’s wife), is the figure in the bottom left, who stands looking up to the crucified Jesus. The scene is depicted in front of the Bay of Port Lligat

Till I had spent an entire weekend
struggling to think laterally, literally in right angles
or as learned mathematicians would call it, along orthogonals.

With the knowledge of how a hypercube opens up into a tesseract
in the fourth spatial dimension, I think I understand why –
the crucifix is a structure floating in 4D
while everything else on the painting is in the 3D
and there is no physical point of contact between the body of Jesus and the cross.

Dali, with his genius, in his painting has opened out the scene of the crucifiction
into the fourth dimension
and maybe beyond.

Salvador DaliCrucifixionfourth dimensionpaintingslittleindian

Because I spent an entire weekend
struggling to think laterally, literally in right angles
or as learned mathematicians would call it, along orthogonals.

Before you think i have gone completely bonkers,
(tell me something I do not already know! )
I assure you, I no longer have interest
in any form of mathematics.

I was only trying to understand how and why
the Doctor’s TARDIS looks bigger on the inside. Honest.
I found it was a bit of ‘space’ which was beyond our three dimensions
the result of Time Lords’ transdimensional engineering.
It is a hypercube,

“which is a “closed, compact, convex figure consisting of groups of opposite parallel line segments aligned in each of the space’s dimensions, at right angles to each other”…

And I agreed. (I am not going to argue with the learned mathematicians).

Take:
a point and move it, you get a line;
a line and move it at rightangles, you get a surface;
a surface and move it at rightangles, you get a solid;
a solid and move it at rightangles, you reach the realms of hypercubes;
starting with the tesseract – which in geometry,
is the four-dimensional analog of the (three-dimensional) cube.

In muggle terms:
The tesseract is to the cube as the cube is to the square;
as the square is to the straight line as the line is to the point.
You get the point?

The TARDIS has an interior which is voluminous in four or more dimensions.
So did Mad-eye Moody’s magical trunk, in which he himself got imprisoned.

I found an image of a tesseract unfolding (or is it folding) upon itself to

Feeling suddenly brave, in my new found cleverness, I decided to explore the Tesseract.

I found a picture (on left) that projects a tesseract in 2D,
and then unfolds it into its 8 cube components.
It looked like a crucifix, reminded me of
a very special one.

This is a painting I have always held in awe.
I have looked at it many times, feeling there was more to it,
with the feeling that I was on the verge of an elusive understanding…

Now I think I do.
Dali, with his genius, in this painting had opened out
the scene of the crucifiction into the fourth dimension and maybe beyond.

 

The painting Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus), by Salvador Dalí, 1954,
depicts the crucified Jesus upon the net of a hypercube.

A whole weekend gone to waste?
Not if I can bore you, ahem , share this with you.

Salvador Dalipaintingsfourth dimensionDoctor WhoHarry Potterlittleindian

A product of Time Lord technology,
“a properly maintained and piloted TARDIS
can transport its occupants to any point in time and space”.

That thing, I was to believe, was a time machine and a spacecraft.
A TARDIS, Time And Relative Dimension(s) In Space.

I simply refused.
For by then I had seen
the proper spacecrafts, the likes of the Enterprise.

They had bridges,
elaborate controls panels, flashing coloured lights;
they had warp drives, travelled at speeds greater than light,
had phase cannons and photonic torpedoes, polarized hull plating.

But that, that was just a phone box.
The interior was an optical illusion, made bigger than outside
after all the Doctor and his companions could not be expected to
stand cramped in a tiny space and deliver their lines, how unromantic.
And, it looked like a cheap theatre set, and never the bridge of a spaceship.

The BBC producers had simply failed to convince me.

I have been trying to catch up with many lost ‘Doctor Who’ years.
In The Robots of Death
I find, the Fourth Doctor had tried to explain to his companion Leela,

how a larger cube can appear to be able to fit inside a smaller one if
the larger cube is farther away but immediately accessible at the same time

Trying to understand what that meant,
I stumbled upon the concept of the fourth dimension.
The inside of the Tardis is not just the script writers’ yarn,
nor an optical illusion, but an example of the Time Lords’ transdimensional engineering.

Yikes!! Yikes Yikes and Yikes again!
I feel embarrassed to admit that all these years,
I had missed the significance of the “Relative Dimension” in the TARDIS.
I was existing happily in 3D, ignorant of the possibility of other dimensions.

From now on, everytime I see an abandoned
phone box, scruffy, worse for wear and blue, I will take a look inside, just in case…

Doctor WhoTARDISscience fictiontravelfourth dimensions