There are some concepts in science that really make your head spin the more you think about them. It's no less than going down the rabbit hole in many of these cases. Take for example the existence of higher dimensions.

Many theories like String Theory, mathematically prove that higher dimensions exist even though we haven't directly observed them yet. Even in science fiction, you will find this topic spring up again and again. One of the most popular ones has to be of the movie Interstellar.

It was only because of a higher dimensional "tesseract" that the protagonist was able to survive and influence specific events in the past that were necessary for the story line. It was a really beautiful representation of a higher dimension.

It can be almost impossible to visualise and understand these concepts for us lay people. Thankfully there are really smart people like Neil DeGrasse Tyson out there who can explain these bizarre concepts and theories in simple terms.

Are We Part of Higher Dimensions?

I was watching a recent interview of Dr. Tyson where he was explaining how one could try and imagine our place in a higher dimension. For this he gave an example of the surface of a desk.

Imagine you are placing sheets of paper on the desk such that you can't put one on top of another. Soon, you will run out of space on the surface of the desk. To be able to store more paper, we would need to use a page organiser (a 3D object).

This access to a higher dimension than just the two dimensions of the surface of the desk, allows us to store a lot more paper on the same surface. But imagine there was a 2D being on the desk watching all of this. For sake of simplicity let's consider an ant as the 2D being.

To store the papers on a page organiser, we would need to lift the papers from the surface of the desk. For us, this is normal behaviour. But for the ant, the papers that are lifted, would literally vanish from its dimension. That is because it can only perceive two dimensions (length and breadth, not height). For us though, it's no problem at all.

Now, imagine us trying to store 3D boxes in a room. Soon, we run out of space. But suppose a higher dimension being (from the 4th dimension) comes and lifts one of the boxes to store it in a higher dimension. For us, the box would literally disappear as we don't have access to that higher dimension but for the alien, it would be normal behaviour.

Do you get it? The ant's example is appropriate to understand the complexities of a higher dimension in simpler terms. What if this is actually true and there are even higher dimensions and there are intelligent beings in all of them? Interesting thought to ponder upon.