Throughout Interstellar, you hear mention of “beings from the fifth dimension” .
Interstellar is based on the ideas of theoretical physicist Kip Thorne – specifically the notion that while we observe the universe in three dimensions, there could be at least five dimensions.
In certain theories, it is posited that certain forces (in this case gravity) bleed through dimensions – meaning that, based on Newton’s Laws, what we perceive as a finite calculation could actually have infinite implications
Lets try to understand what the firts four dimensions are first the we will understand the fifth dimension.
The things in our daily life have height, width and length. But for someone whos only known life in two dimensions, 3-D would be impossible to comprehend. And that, according to many researchers, is the reason we cant see the fourth dimension, or any other dimension beyond that.
Physicists work under the assumption that there are at least 10 dimensions, but the majority of us will never "see" them. Because we only know life in 3-D, our brains dont understand how to look for anything more.
In 1884, Edwin A. Abbot published a novel that depicts the problem of seeing dimensions beyond your own. In "Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions," Abbot describes the life of a square in a two-dimensional world. Living in 2-D means that the square is surrounded by circles, triangles and rectangles, but all the square sees are other lines. One day, the square is visited by a sphere.
On first glance, the sphere just looks like a circle to the square, and the square cant comprehend what the sphere means when he explains 3-D objects. Eventually, the sphere takes the square to the 3-D world, and the square understands. He sees not just lines, but entire shapes that have depth.
Emboldened, the square asks the sphere what exists beyond the 3-D world; the sphere is appalled. The sphere cant comprehend a world beyond this, and in this way, stands in for the reader. Our brains arent trained to see anything other than our world, and it will likely take something from another dimension to make us understand.
But what is this other dimension? Mystics used to see it as a place where spirits lived, since they werent bound by our earthly rules. In his theory of special relativity, Einstein called the fourth dimension time, but noted that time is inseparable from space.
Science fiction aficionados may recognize that union as space-time, and indeed, the idea of a space-time continuum has been popularized by science fiction writers for centuries . Einstein described gravity as a bend in space-time. Today, some physicists describe the fourth dimension as any space thats perpendicular to a cube the problem being that most of us cant visualize something that is perpendicular to a cube
Researchers have used Einsteins ideas to determine whether we can travel through time. While we can move in any direction in our 3-D world, we can only move forward in time. Thus, traveling to the past has been deemed near-impossible, though some researchers still hold out hope for finding wormholes that connect to different sections of space-time
If we cant use the fourth dimension to time travel, and if we cant even see the fourth dimension, then whats the point of knowing about it? Understanding these higher dimensions is of importance to mathematicians and physicists because it helps them understand the world. String theory, for example, relies upon at least 10 dimensions to remain viable . For these researchers, the answers to complex problems in the 3-D world may be found in the next dimension and beyond.
Fifth Dimension
Right now, we have access to our three spatial dimensions, so you can occupy any position within your three-dimensional spatial coordinates at any time. In time, we are prisoners of the present forever prevented from accessing our past, or our future. If you go to a higher dimension, its not unrealistic to imagine that your entire timeline would be laid out in front of you no differently than the way our space dimensions are laid out in front of us now, so that you can occupy any point from birth to death in your own timeline. In the tesseract as they call it, which is just a higher-dimensional space system
References
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Goudarzi
Groleau
Overbye