Wrinkles in Space Time

In middle school, I stumbled into the fourth dimension and never found my way out. Two people pushed me over the hyper-edge: Madeleine L’Engle, the author of A Wrinkle in Time, and Mr. Orchid, my seventh grade English teacher.

In a move of rarely-matched brilliance on the part of my town’s school board, A Wrinkle in Time was on the seventh grade reading list. A classic of children’s literature, L’Engle’s book is beloved by generations of young readers despite (or perhaps because of) the complex science behind it. Much of what seems supernatural in the novel is actually scientific; L’Engle drew on ideas from modern physics that were extremely new when she wrote the book in 1963, and still sound pretty outrageous today. In her hands, however, quantum physics reads like the most simple and intuitive thing in the world—you might not even know it’s there, lurking deep within the dark and stormy night.

Mr. Orchid made sure we knew it was there. Before reading A Wrinkle in Time, he introduced us to extra dimensions, one of the book’s founding ideas. We live in a three-dimensional world: objects have height, width, and depth. In a fourth dimensional world, an extra direction is added, one that our three dimensional brains cannot visualize. (Thanks to Einstein, we are used to hearing that time is the fourth dimension; however, it is not exactly a spatial dimension. The fourth spatial dimension is different than time, and I will only be discussing spatial dimensions in this piece.)
Draw a square. It has length and width, but not depth.

The square is confined to the 2D world of the surface of the paper. “Up” and “down” do not exist for the square, as it can only move back and forth. The square behaves like you do while driving a car—it can only travel in certain directions, and when it meets an obstacle, it must go around it, not over it. You, a three-dimensional being, operate with the benefit of up and down. For the square, entering a 3D world would be like discovering that after a lifetime of driving, you could hop on an airplane and go over those obstacles in your way.

Traveling with the help of the fourth dimension would be like digging a hole to China—there would be direct links between distant points. Instead of flying in an airplane, you could push in the fourth dimensional direction and suddenly pop into your destination. This is how the children in A Wrinkle in Time travel; they call it a tesseract, we call it a wormhole.

Something that L’Engle didn’t know when she wrote the book is that extra dimensions may very well be a reality. Forget about four—we’re talking 10+. Unfortunately, they probably don’t come in the form of wormholes. These extra dimensions, if they exist at all, are probably incredibly tiny, curled up in every point of our three large spatial dimensions. If we could zoom in on small enough pieces of the subatomic scale, we might see that the fabric of the three dimensional universe twists itself into shapes we cannot even imagine. This idea is extremely important for string theory, the popular frontrunner in the search for the theory of everything.

L’Engle often asserted that children’s literature was too difficult for adults to understand, and A Wrinkle in Time proves her point. There’s a reason that beginning physics classes start with bullet trajectories and not multidimensional Kaluza-Klein shapes. The bullets are tangible, real, and easily visualized. There’s only one problem—they are boring.

As actual science moves closer to sci-fi, amazing educational opportunities arise. Mr. Orchid didn’t teach me high energy physics, but he gave me the tools and the enthusiasm to explore it later. Thanks to Barnard’s science requirement, I had the chance to come back to it. Science is part of both Columbia’s Core and Barnard’s Nine Ways of Knowing, and the laudable goal behind its inclusion is to give students an understanding of and, more importantly, an appreciation for science. Science is supposed to open your mind, and it is unfortunate that many students on campus complain that fulfilling their science requirements did just the opposite. But rather than calling for scrapping the requirement altogether, students and faculty should look for more creative ways to approach the subject matter. Introducing non-scientists to contemporary topics and debates is a far better way to inspire them than giving them tedious problem sets about issues that seem irrelevant.

L’Engle recently passed away, but it’s hard to imagine her legacy fading. Several generations have grown up with her books, which are only becoming more relevant with each new physics discovery. But more important than her ability to synthesize real science and kid-friendly fantasy was her insistence that kids could handle the real science. The most outrageous concepts are usually the most interesting ones and we should start, rather than end, our education with them, in seventh grade and in college.

Elizabeth Wade is a Barnard College senior majoring in comparative literature.
Fear of Physics a runs alternate Mondays.
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