Take a point.  One point, zero dimensions.  No width, breadth, height.

Expand that point out one direction.  You now have a line: one dimension (length), two terminal points.

Expand that line parallel to itself such that no point in the line is crossing another point.  You now have a square, with two dimensions (width, length), four sides, and four terminal points.

Expand that square parallel to itself, in the same manner as your line (above), and you have a cube.  Three dimensions, six sides, eight terminal points.  Easy enough to envision, as this is the space that we experience — our visual and spatial perspective.

And while you can do this with Euclidian geometry and all sorts of quantum thinking, I’m sure, try to picture in your head expanding that cube out — not up, down, left, right, forward or backward, as the cube already exists in each of these directions, but somehow further away from its center in a new direction altogether.  You’re left with a four-dimensional object, with eight terminal points.  I can draw you a 3D representation of this — it took me a while to figure out where the additional eight terminal points go (creating objects in theoretical X dimensional space requires 2^X terminal points) — but getting that new dimension in my head is eluding me.

Flatland, A Romance of Many Dimensions, by E. A. Abbott, was published in 1884, a social satire that now exists on shelves next to books of pure mathematical exploration.  And it makes me wonder, and wander, and hurt a little bit in that special way that Mommy warned me about. It was a lot of fun to read, much in the same way that Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams was — which is to say that underlying the writing and the tone and the character and whatever else exists in the fiction, there’s a current that pushes my brain down new roads.  These books — like some movies, some music, some random combinations of conversation and timing — open doors in my head, encouraging me to explore the new places.  Unfortunately, these doors are often pitch black just beyond the frame, and so I’m stuck with a lot of open doors in my head, and less time every day to think that I might one day see what lies beyond each of them.

I just hope that, whichever knowledge I’m ever eventually able to obtain, it’s the important part.

Considering that I’m spending hours tonight unable to crack my copy of the highly-anticipated new Stephen King book, distracted as I am trying to visualize an additional spatial element beyond that which I’ve known all my life, I guess important is as subjective as I suppose everything else is. And I realize that it’s thought paths like these that explain why writing computer code all day is relaxing to me.