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Cosmos - Carl Sagan - 4th Dimension

carlsagandotcom · lecture · Watch on YouTube

Pure mathematicsRecreational & visual mathFundamental physics

What it is

A segment from Carl Sagan's original Cosmos explaining the fourth spatial dimension through analogy with a two-dimensional world and shadow projection.

Why Hacker News recommends it

HN recommends it as the clearest intuitive introduction to thinking about a fourth dimension.

  • 3 people recommended it
  • 3 different months
  • 1 strong recommendations
  • first 2014, last 2025

What HN commenters said

  1. “brilliantly exemplified by Carl Sagan in this popular video”

    Sagan illustrates the 4th dimension via shadow projection analogy

    lgl, 2021-04 · Strong recommendation · in “Does the Universe Have Higher Dimensions? Part 1”

  2. “I find this segment by Carl Sagan from the original Cosmos to be pretty well presented on the topic”

    Sagan's clear presentation of the fourth dimension from Cosmos

    CodeCube, 2014-02 · Recommendation · in “4D Tesseract: Fourth Dimension Game”

  3. “This video might help.”

    Helps build intuition about a fourth spatial dimension

    travisjungroth, 2024-10 · Recommendation · in “Counterintuitive Properties of High Dimensional Space (2018)”

Excerpts from Hacker News comments, linked to the originals. Summaries and labels were written by a language model from those comments.

Topics: fourth dimension, carl sagan, cosmos, flatland, geometry

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