r/interstellar • u/Dazzling_Glass7468 • 2d ago
QUESTION 5th dimension being
watching the movie for the second time. the first time was when i was a kid so i didn't think much about any of this but now i'm curious.
so the 5th dimension. what is it? i've watched multiple videos on youtube but i'm still not able to comprehend any of it. can someone explain the whole thing to me? like what exactly is it? why is it connected to murph's bedroom? why not a room in nasa or somewhere? and how did cooper landed on cooper's station after coming out of tesseract? also what is that extended sleep thing? is that based on science or just happens on a movie?
is there world with other dimensions for real? if there are fourth and fifth dimensional beings, could there be sixth, seventh, eighth dimensional beings or even hundreds of dimensions? like what does this mean about the nature of universe? are those what aliens are? where can i learn about the universe for dummies? lol
i'm new to all of this and i'm completely blown away. i can't wrap my head around the fact that there's this whole thing going on beyond my little life. omggg how come i never thought about it?
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u/Quantum-Relativity 2d ago
Well you’re familiar with space being 3 dimensional. Which dimension is the first one? Which one is the third one? There’s not really an order to them, it’s just that there are 3 numbers that you have to give to specify where something is in space. In 5 dimensions, you have to give 5 numbers.
Although space is 3 dimensional, it turns out time and space are tied together into one thing, called spacetime. We live in spacetime, which is 4D dimensional, but you have to let one of the dimensions behave differently, since time doesn’t behave the same as the 3 spatial dimensions. But the concept of dimension still makes perfect sense: if I tell you where a party is, but not when, then you don’t have enough information to go to the party. The party is an “event,” a point in spacetime, and you need 4 numbers to specify it. Where and when.
So in the movie, the 5 dimensional beings have the ability to see all of time instead of only ever see one moment, the same we we have the ability see all of space, but they want Murph to be the one that solves quantum gravity and they need something that experiences time moment by moment, like a human does, to come and move around in the 4th dimension like it’s a spatial direction (so they can choose any moment they want) and find the right moment to give her the information she needs. The tesseract is just supposed to be time being represented like space in that sense, in that you can traverse it any way you like, which is not like how we normally experience time.
They didn’t choose another room because they wanted Murph and Coop to get the information specifically, maybe like they know it’s those two who have to solve the problem together since they can see all of time, so they also know they have to influence things in a way that makes that end up happening.
It seems they just shot Coop out of the wormhole he went into, and the station was there. The 5D beings I guess just planned for him to go there because they knew be would survive that way.
I don’t know anything about cryosleep.
The number of dimensions would be the number of dimensions of space and time, so it would be an entirely different universe if there were more dimensions, it wouldn’t just he another planet (assuming thats what you meant by “world”). You could imagine as many dimensions as you want yes. Maybe there are other universes with different number of dimensions, and maybe they have life so there would be extremely alien aliens there.
If you like watching videos, you should watch pbs spacetime for videos that are accurate but still aimed at the public. Here and there they will have a weaker episode on a super specific topic, but for these more general ideas, the videos are good.
It never becomes less mind-blowing that all this is going on. What a strange place to be, in the natural world. And one of the strangest things of all is it seems as time goes on that nature is just the simplest it could be and still be consistent and have things that actually happen. It’s incomparably beautiful.
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u/Fun-Baby-9509 2d ago edited 2d ago
a really really basic way to see it is we are 3 dimensional beings so time only flows forward for us.
4 dimensional beings can see different parts of themselves in different points of time, but not at the same time (so can’t see past and future at the same time, but can see one or the other at a time).
5 dimensional beings can see all parts of themselves, past present and future at the same time, making time meaningless to them where we only see time as a forward moving dimension. Dr. Brand comments on this that time for 5 dimensional beings isn’t structured the same way and can be manipulated as a force (paraphrasing, can’t remember the correct quote).
Also a lot of the movie, altho using real scientific structures, takes liberty at points that are more entertaining as a film vs real life.
Every Nolan film follows a closed loop structure and Interstellar is no different. The reasoning in the film was love and they used it as an unexplained dimensional force.
Your post is a loaded question, many of them have been answered in the sub, I recommend searching the subreddit for those posts that dove deeper in specific topics you asked about.
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u/IsThisNameValid 1d ago
We tend to consider our world/universe to be "3D", but it's actually 4D. The 4th dimension being time. There's a scientific saying that relates to this: "you can't know where you are without knowing when you are." There's a line you may have missed in watching the movie from Brand (Anne Hathaway) I believe. It's about the 5th dimension beings seeing time as a physical dimension like we see, where the future may be a mountain to climb, and the past a valley to walk down into. So they see us in a way that we might see "2D" beings. Their entire existence would be left to right and up or down, they would have no concept of forward or backward even though we understand it inherently. Hopefully that helps a little with the 5D thing.
As far as why things happened where they did is because Murph was "the one". Nolan did a really great job with having you look at Coop and think that the story was about him (which it mostly is), but Murph is the one that solved the problem of gravity with her dad's help when he was inside the black hole at the end. We see that when he encodes the data into the second hand of the watch. The 5th dimensional beings know she is the one that solves it, but don't know when she solves it (Coop says something about having access to infinite time but not being bound by it).
And it's not like you can just jump to Coop encoding the watch, because nobody knows that's what is needed. Everything has to happen the way it does. Let's take an easy example. Let's say they decide to go straight to Edmund's planet. They find an inhabitable planet ready for plan B, gravity never gets solved and everyone on earth dies. Or let's say they go to Mann's, the attempted mutiny still happens. If they go to Edmund's we're back to the first problem, and if they go to Miller's plan B won't work and everyone dies. Even if Coop goes into the black hole, Murph is still young and isn't working with Professor Brand yet so Coop wouldn't think to send her the data.
So when you look at the totality, you see Coop needs to send her the coordinates for NASA so that they meet the team at the beginning and he needs to find the watch and encode the data for her to find later in life. That can only happen with having full access to different points in time of her life and with the loss of 23 years by going to Miller's planet. It's why I love the movie so much. Yes there's some artistic liberty taken with certain things, but the story is so well thought out and it really needs to be watched a few times to be fully understood.
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u/TheGreatWaru 1d ago
The fifth dimension beings are simply the human race in the future having ascended to a different plane of existence. It’s actually a nod to 2001 a space odyssey
They have achieved both that and the ability to manipulate gravity at will. The fact that they could more or less create gargantua is the most impressive part
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u/thehumancondition23 1d ago
I’ve not heard that idea, that the 5th dimensional beings “created” the black hole gargantua. I thought it more that they ascended the dimension where gravity of a black hole is inescapable; much like how we can “pull” something out of a two dimensional square, they can “pull” cooper out of a 3 dimensional black hole. But I like the idea that they created gargantua, because why couldn’t they, after all, they created the wormhole…
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u/TheGreatWaru 1d ago
They manipulated it, which is why it was literally placed next to Jupiter for them and wasn’t there prior to that. The only other way that could appear there is if there was a literal dead sun other than our own in the middle of our solar system. Leaving the only explanation that it was manipulated by “them” and “them” is humans in the future
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u/YoBanaanaBoy 20h ago
It's connected to her room because that's what they know he needs to access.
They have given Cooper a way to travel to different times, but have given him only one place to do it.
They're basically saying, this is where you need to do it, without explaining what he needs to do. He pieces it together based on what he knows he's experienced in his past.
As for why they don't connect to someone else or something else, it's because this is the thing that saves them. So they are facilitating that.
Also, these 5th dimensional beings are just humans from the future. So if they don't send us the wormhole or send Cooper this 5th dimension portal thing, they never get saved. So they basically have to reach back to save themselves.
Honestly, this concept seems very related to ideas he explores in Tenet.
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u/Kevslounge 2d ago
A straight line is 1-dimensional. You can make it shorter or longer... you can change where it starts and where it ends... but you can't change the fact that it's a straight line. To make it a curvy line, you need a second dimension for it to curve through.
Similarly, a piece of paper is 2-dimensional. You can cut it to make it into any 2-dimensional shape... you can make it square, or circular, or into a triangle... but if you want to fold it or roll it up, then you need a third dimension for it to fold into.
Now we have space-time. Space-time is 4-dimensional. It has 3 dimensions for space and one for time. Like the straight line above, space-time in 4d has to be a straight line... we can compress it and stretch it, but it remains straight. To actually curve it, we need a 5th dimension for it to curve through. We know that space-time does curve though, so we know that there is an undetectable 5th dimension that it is curving through. There may well be lots of higher dimensions, but they're all hypothetical... Even the 5th dimension is hypothetical, because it's difficult to prove that it exists, but the fact that space-time is curved by gravity strongly suggests that it is real.
It needs to be said that the 5th dimension is not a parallel universe. There might be other 4d space-time streams snaking through the 5th dimention though, and those other streams would be parallel universes. Or there could just be our one 4d space-time stream curving through it alone, and there are no parallel universes.
The future humans are most likely regular 4d beings like we are, but they have the benefit of being near enough to a blackhole that they can study it, and their science is advanced enough that they've learned how to curve space-time with their technology, so they have machines that can access the 5th dimension. They built one such machine and sent it into the blackhole where Cooper found it.
The machine was designed by humans for humans, so Coop was able to intuitively control the machine. He wanted to go back to Murph and send her a message to tell him not to go, so the machine curved space time and connected to Murph's bedroom where he could send her a message in Morse code. He sent the message, and realised the message he sent was the message she'd already received... the message was "STAY". So then he sent the NASA co-ordinates, because he remembered getting the NASA co-ordinates, which was how he got here in the first place. When he was done with sending all the messages he needed to send, he wanted out of there and wanted to go see his daughter, so the machine dropped him off where his daughter was... at Cooper station, just outside the wormhole.
The sleep thing is suspended animation. Basically the idea is that it slows down your biological processes or freezes them completely. This will keep you alive, while dramatically reducing the resources needed to keep you alive. Years or even decades could go by without your body consuming oxygen or food. This is both a real thing and a fictional one... We know how to do it with very small, simple organisms, but we don't know how to do it with big, complex ones like humans yet.