Simon built “the shadow of a 4D object” during math class, inspired by the Royal Institution’s video Four Dimensional Maths: Things to See and Hear in the Fourth Dimension with Matt Parker. Simon loved the video and watched it twice. We had come across similar thought experiments while reading a book by Jacob Perelman, a Russian mathematician, where the 4th dimension was visualized as the time dimension and the objects sliding along that 4th axis would appear and disappear in our 3D world just like 3D objects would appear as their cross sections if they were observed by 2D creatures. Here is how Simon visualized it.
The first drawing is of a 3D object the way it actually looks when passing through a 2D world:
And this is what the inhabitants of the 2D world (unable to see in 3D) see – a sequence of sections of the 3D object. Similarly, we (unable to see in 4D) only see sequences of 3D sections of the 4D objects passing our world. Maybe, everything we see around us are such sections of much more complex objects as they are moving through time. “Maybe, we’re just 3D shadows of 4D objects”, says Simon.
