An inspection of above figures will give an answer to many questions
about the tesseract. If we have a tesseract one inch each way, then it
can be represented as a cube—a cube having white, yellow, red axes,
and from this cube as a beginning, a volume extending into the fourth
dimension. Now suppose the tesseract to pass transverse to our space,
the cube of the red, yellow, white axes disappears at once, it is
indefinitely thin in the fourth dimension. Its place is occupied by
those parts of the tesseract which lie further away from our space in
the fourth dimension. Each one of these sections will last only for
one moment, but the whole of them will take up some appreciable time
in passing. If we take the rate of one inch a minute the sections will
take the whole of the minute in their passage across our space, they
will take the whole of the minute except the moment which the beginning
cube and the end cube occupy in their crossing our space. In each one
of the cubes, the section cubes, we can draw lines in all directions
except in the direction occupied by the blue line, the fourth
dimension; lines in that direction are represented by the transition
from one section cube to another. Thus to give ourselves an adequate
representation of the tesseract we ought to have a limitless number of
section cubes intermediate between the first bounding cube, the ochre
cube, and the last bounding cube, the other ochre cube. Practically
three intermediate sectional cubes will be found sufficient for most
purposes. We will take then a series of five figures—two terminal
cubes, and three intermediate sections—and show how the different
regions appear in our space when we take each set of three out of the
four axes of the tesseract as lying in our space.
In fig. 107 initial letters are used for the colours. A reference to
fig. 103 will show the complete nomenclature, which is merely indicated
here.
[Illustration: Fig. 107.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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