Tesseract: Time isn’t a ticking clock, it’s like an accordion

We inhabit three dimensions, moving through the fourth (time) like a needle on a record, convinced that only the ‘now’ under the needle exists. That’s because we don’t understand that the ‘then’ and the ‘now’ are different coordinates in a map we haven’t learnt to read. A fine example of popular culture’s attempt to explain this concept is the 1997 Hollywood classic, ‘Contact’, based on Carl Sagan’s book

Time has long been treated as the ultimate democratic constant. In the ledger of the universe, everyone is supposedly credited with the same 24 hours, regardless of status or geography. Yet, as any knowledge worker staring at a vanishing deadline, or a traveller trapped in the purgatory of a flight delay knows, this is a statistical illusion. Time does not flow; it stretches, contracts, and occasionally refuses to move at all.

We are told by physicists that time is a dimension, but to the rest of us, it usually just feels like a long Monday morning. To understand this elasticity, one must first visualise the ‘Metric of Trust’ we place in our 3-dimensional reality. We move through length, width, and height with total confidence, yet we are blindsided by the fourth. This is where the ‘Tesseract’ serves as the perfect intellectual anchor.

A tesseract is to a cube, what a cube is to a square — a 4-dimensional hypercube. While we can only see its ‘shadow’ in our world — often depicted as a haunting cube-within-a-cube — it represents a direction of movement we cannot physically take. It is the geometric proof that there is ‘more’ available, more than what our senses report. If we could step into the corridors of a tesseract, we might see the past and future, not as distant memories or hopes, but as adjacent rooms in the same house.

Few popular works captured this ‘preservation vs renovation’ of our reality better than Carl Sagan’s 1985 novel, ‘Contact’. In the story, Eleanor Arroway discovers that our 3-dimensional existence is merely a thin skin, stretched over a much deeper complex. When she finally travels through the ‘Machine’, she isn’t just moving across space; she is traversing a landscape, where the standard democratic contract of time is voided.

Also read: Interstellar, Einstein and the strange elasticity of time

Released in an era before science fiction became a ubiquitous weekly commodity, Contact’s central thesis remains radical. For the observers on the ground, Ellie’s drop through the Machine lasts a mere fraction of a second — a blip in the recording. For Ellie, the experience encompasses hours of wonder and conversation. Both accounts are objectively true, proving that the time-horizon of a single event is entirely dependent on one’s dimensional vantage point. Time, it turns out, is less like a ticking clock, and more like an accordion, played by a musician who ignores the metronome.

Sagan, a master of the ‘Stakeholder Logic’ of the cosmos, loved to bridge these dizzying gaps with homespun metaphors. His most famous demonstration involved a humble apple. If you slice an apple horizontally, each disk represents a 2-dimensional world. A ‘Flatlander’ living on one slice would be oblivious to the slices above or below. To them, their thin layer is the totality of existence. The third dimension — the height of the apple — is an invisible ghost.

If we extend this logic to our own lives, we realise we are the Flatlanders of time. We inhabit three dimensions, moving through the fourth (time) like a needle on a record, convinced that only the ‘now’ under the needle exists. But from the perspective of a tesseract, the entire record exists simultaneously. The ‘then’ of 1980s, when Sagan wrote the book, and the ‘now’ of the 2020s are not gone; they are simply different coordinates on a map we haven’t learned to read.

Sagan even offered a ‘Modest Proposal’ regarding the fundamental constants of nature, specifically the transcendental number ‘pi’. He speculated that if one calculated pi to a deep enough decimal point, a non-random pattern — a circle of zeroes and ones — would appear. This would be the ultimate ‘kicker’: a signature from an architect, proving that the universe was built with a specific intent, and that mathematics is the bridge between our 3-dimensional limits, and the higher-dimensional reality of the tesseract.

Ultimately, this suggests that our daily struggle with time — the alarms, the ageing, the ‘five more minutes’ — is a local phenomenon, a byproduct of our limited perspective. Somewhere in the cosmic architecture, yesterday is still unfolding and tomorrow is already settled. We are simply stakeholders in a long-lasting outcome that we currently only see in cross-sections. This is a comforting thought. It implies that when we feel time ‘crawling’, we aren’t being poetic. We are simply catching a glimpse of the fourth dimension’s true, mischievous shape.

“Tesseract: The Geometry of Truth” is produced by The Times of India, with concept and visualisation by Meera Jain.

Experience “Tesseract: The Geometry of Truth”, running from 16 to 22 March 2026 at NCPA Mumbai. Book here

(The writer is an Ahmedabad based anaesthesiologist)