Childhood dreams of travel in the fifth dimension
I read a lot of books growing up and I don’t always remember the title of the book or the author. When I read about 5 minutes for books children’s classics carnival, I immediately thought of writing about my favorite time travel book. Except, I could not remember the title and I thought the author’s name may have been Engel, Ingall, Engle. Do I have a poor memory or is 20 years sufficient excuse for not remembering? Thanks to google and the word tesseract, I was able to find the book. It’s called a Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle and it was my very first science fiction book. While I remember being mesmerized by the story at the time I read it, I cannot recall the storyline and many other details. But I’ve always remembered one little detail - tesseract.
Tesseract means travel in the fifth dimension, a type of time travel. As I explained to anyone who cared to listen at the time, and for many years afterwards, a line is one dimension. You square it to get a second dimension. You square the second dimension to get a fourth. The fourth dimension is the space we live in. But if you squared that fourth dimension, you get a fifth. Need more explanation? Imagine taking a line from point A to B. Then bend the line so that points A and B are in the same place, that’s the fifth dimension. That’s tesseract! And it absolutely made sense. I found an excerpt of that section of the book here. Note that use of the word tesseract in the real world is different.
As a kid, I was completed facsinated by time travel. And when I read Madeleine Engle’s Wrinkle in time, I became absolutely convinced that time travel was easy…if only the physicists and engineers could let go of their rigid assumptions, they would figure it out. If only I had the laboratory or the equipment to actually build a time travel device or to apply the formula to bend time and space, I could take a trip back into history to verify the various assertions about the evolution man and how the dinosaur became extinct. The possibilities were endless.
Today, I no longer believe in time travel and it’s such a shame. The less clueless I became, the fewer possibilities existed and I sometimes yearn for that time when anything was possible.
I found some reviews on Amazon and I was stunned to find that there was a lot of depth to the book which I had apparently missed. I would love to read the book again and I have a perfect excuse to buy the book. It’ll make a great gift for my daughter in a few years…or earlier.
Thanks for joining us.
What a lovely description of the magic of books in childhood. My daughter just read this book this summer (she’s almost 10). I bought it at a used bookstore a year or so ago, and thought that she would like it now.
It was a score!
I will have to look into this one for my son. Great review, thanks for sharing!
As you know I wrote about this book too, and I did read it last year for the first time in over 20 years. I probably missed a lot of depth this time around too so I’ll go check out Amazon. Great post!
Yes this book does have a lot of depth. I reviewed it a couple of months ago on my blog. I reviewed a book by Edith Nesbit.