I’ve been mulling over the site Imagining the Tenth Dimension which Rich linked on Friday. I’ve drawn pictures and built models, and it’s absolutely fascinating to discover and confirm for myself that time travel and teleportation are both trivial tasks.

Of course, it’s not going to be that easy, is it? However all we have to do is gain control of the 4th dimension and learn how to fold it to achieve teleportation. Time travel is a little more difficult requiring folding of the 5th dimension.

Let me attempt to explain, taking the simplest case… one dimension.

In a one-dimensional world, you exist on a line. The only thing you can say about your position is how far along that line you are. Now - gain control of the second dimension and you can bend the line around so that it crosses itself (try drawing a simple ‘christian’ type fish, or greek letter alpha). Now by walking to the crossing point, you can appear instantaneously at a different point on the line.

For example, start at one of the points of the line and start walking. When you reach the crossroads, turn towards the other point. You have just done the full journey along the line, but have succeeded in missing out the whole of the loop. If you like, you have teleported from a position 20% of the way along the line to a position 80% of the way along the line.

In two dimensions, what you just achieved wasn’t a particularly clever move, but to anyone trapped in the single dimension of the line, they will bow down to you as a deity, or at least a good magician.

So, now let’s extend this concept to a two-dimensional world. A sheet of paper, or a map is probably the best example of position in two dimensions. Take your map book and start driving along one of the roads. Now, by folding this map through the third dimension, you can make a different road line up with the one you’re currently travelling along. In the two-dimensional world you just teleported from one location to another completely different location.

Now, as we move into three dimensions, it becomes more complicated to visualise. The reason for this is that we live in a three-dimensional world, so we find it more difficult to grasp the idea of folding the fourth dimension (time), but we can probably manage something as follows…

Draw a straight line, label the points A and B. The line represents time, and the points represent complete three-dimensional states. At point A you are in Aberdeen, while by the time we reach point B, you have travelled to Bristol. The line, therefore, represents many hours of travel.

But who says we have to actually use any of that time? If we can fold the fourth dimension, as we did with our line in the first example, let’s see what can happen.

So draw your fish again, and label the points A and B. Start at point A, in Aberdeen and walk (in time) towards the crossroads. When you reach the crossroads, turn towards point B and continue to walk. Hey presto! You’ve just travelled the journey while hardly using up any time.

What I find interesting here is that the journey will not be instantaneous. It seems you will still lose the amount of time that it would have taken to make the journey - you just won’t experience that time passing. I believe you will also age appropriately, too, since the timeline we’re walking along is a representation of the state of the three-dimensional world. During the loop of the fish, the world will continue to exist and go about its business, and you won’t exist in it because you’ve walked off into the folded fourth dimension.

Extend once again, and we start to get really interesting, and even more difficult to visualise. Now, the start and end points of our line represent four-dimensional points in space-time. By folding the fifth dimension, we can now travel anywhere in space-time. We can’t jump between the ‘trousers of time’ though - that requires sixth-dimensional folding. I haven’t yet worked out the implications of the length of the loop in these higher-dimension folds and whether aging takes place. My brain hurts too much.