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.
“If you’ve ever been in the booth when the film spills off the reel and onto the floor, you have a very tactile idea of the relentless and frightening passage of time.” —Christopher Nolan Dan Winters
Film’s relationship with dimensionality has always fascinated me: two-dimensional representations of three dimensions printed onto a strip whose length adds the dimension of time. Time is strikingly represented by the rapidly unspooling rolls of celluloid on a projector. If you’ve ever been in the booth when the film spills off the reel and onto the floor while the movie is running, you have a very tactile idea of the relentless and frightening passage of time by which we all live.
A magazine offers a far more comfortable relationship with time—we can flick through it, stop, flip back, keep it forever. It can do a good job of representing spatial dimensions through photography and design, but ultimately it’s the reader’s mind that defines the dimensionality of the magazine. Years ago, discussing Memento with a journalist, I revealed that as a left-hander I tend to leaf through magazines back to front, and we agreed this might go some way toward explaining Memento‘s backward structure. I resisted the urge to try to give you my experience of magazines by reversing the entire issue, opting instead to encourage the WIRED staff in their fool’s errand of attempting to represent five dimensions in the very substance of the magazine. Why five? Because if we can get our heads around the idea that time is just a fourth dimension, no more noble or abstract than the other three, then the fifth dimension reveals itself as the perch we have to climb onto to be able to actually view the four dimensions we know. A massive leap, but a leap we can almost conceive of.
It feels like it should be possible, which lets us imagine a complete understanding of our four-dimensional existence rendered instantly by our new, higher-dimensional perspective. Many of the people and ideas springing from these pages push so hard in this direction (a direction we know exists but cannot visualize) that the limits of our world start to seem a tiny bit more porous than they did.
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