Spacetime. One of the most stimulating and challenging compound nouns. Thoughts of Einstein, of relativity, of complex physical laws that hover tantalizingly beyond our ability to grasp (I'm not writing this for Kip Thorne and his colleagues). The word pulls time down from its perch of abstraction and drags it into the mud with the other three dimensions, the ones we can get our hands into and our heads around. By doing this, however, it also suggests the limits of our world. Higher dimensions may exist, but we have no words to describe them. Mathematics can give us a glimpse, but only those of us with highly developed algebraic skills (not me, for the record). Which brings us to the most frustrating part: We can only really see the dimensions below the one we exist in—a problem never more clearly or cleverly explored than in Reverend Edwin A. Abbott's novella, Flatland, where a three-dimensional creature struggles to explain his existence to a two-dimensional creature who can himself see only one of the dimensions he lives in.
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