Reddit reviews Surfing through Hyperspace: Understanding Higher Universes in Six Easy Lessons

My take was that we should have probably seen the 71 bombs coming. I remember watching Elliot try to re-route the trucks and thinking how the DA would also see this and could work around it by bombing the trucks en route if need be. They have the destinations and transit paths and everything Elliot has. Or just carjack them and burn the records inside. Lots of options here for the DA, but I didnt see bombing every building they stopped at coming, but someone did. In fact, a redditor figured it out weeks ago and his comment is linked on the front page, but the comment was fairly buried so maybe Sam and his team missed it.


On the more sci-fi/future tech front, the Congo is the world's source of cobalt which has more applications than just weapons and batteries. It has been discovered in the lab to facilitate quantum tunneling. My layperson's understanding is that this is all possible due to cobalt's unique magnetization properties and that QT is pretty much teleportation. It allows particles to move through a barrier without actually going through the barrier. Sam may be hinting that China has figured out how to make this work in human scale and with huge amounts of low-cost cobalt could have the key to things like dimensional travel (where do you go if you don't pass through the barrier? You could bypass it via a higher spatial dimension). If you can enter higher spatial dimensions then you more or less have time travel. You can look back on our entire timeline from the 4th dimension, see everything, and even interact with it somehow. No one really 'dies' because everyone's life can be seen from a higher spatial dimension like running through a nonstop video of their lives. Cliff Pickover has a fun and easy to read book on the subject for those interested.

On a more ridiculous sci-fi front, perhaps large scale quantum tunneling did actually happen at the WTP. Edward, and perhaps others, were briefly tunneled into a higher spatial dimension, essentially making them trans-dimensional beings whether they realize it or not. Edward's consciousness is safely in this higher dimension and intervenes in the modern world through Elliot's body as he sees fit. WR may have shown Angela that her mother is also a trans-dimensional being due to being at the WPT and could be accessed similarly. Zhang/WR then would also have this connection, perhaps granted by a similar accident in China. Perhaps WR was an WTP employee too, not Zhang himself, but a once alive physical woman that now works through Zhang the same way Edward works through Elliot. Maybe this woman was literally his sister, or other relative, who migrated to the US to study physics and landed a job at E-corp.

This can also explain WR's obsession with time. Imagine being able to access the 4th dimension where 3rd dimension time is just a property you can manipulate as you like, a bit like running the slider on a youtube video or playing around with scenes and objects in a game engine and being able to move the physics forward or backwards as you like. You'd be able to see our future but the future, I imagine, would be an infinite range of possibilities but you can narrow it down to a 'if x happens then what happens next' system and have limited but powerful precognition powers. It must feel oppressive to be in the 3rd dimension and to be 'locked' into real time. That's on top of knowing what a plausible timeline in our future could be and trying to make those future outcomes happen here, which would require perfect timing unless you want your probability wave to go someplace you didn't plan on. Everything must be perfect to the split second or your predictive information from the 4th dimension won't work.

WR's big plan may be to recreate the WTP accident globally and on a much larger scale so everyone can tunnel to a higher spatial dimension after death. Consciousness just finds its way to a higher dimension where 3rd dimension limitations like death don't matter. This also explains why the DA is so casual about dying. If WR's plan works out, they will become immortal and accessible to us regardless of when or how they died.

Check out Surfing through Hyperspace by Clifford Pickover. It does a pretty good job of explaining what it would be like to interact with a higher dimension. Unfortunately there is a weird detective story nested inside the non-fiction material that is used to sort of illustrate the concepts he discusses. I eventually just skipped those sections as they're very bad and not really necessary.

Also, if you find you like it, you can follow-up with Pickover's Sex, Drugs, Einstein and Elves.

This book is actually quite useful in answering your question. https://www.amazon.com/Surfing-through-Hyperspace-Understanding-Universes/dp/0195130065/ref=nodl_

The short answer is “no” — as 3rd dimensional beings, we cannot really conceptualize a 4th spatial dimension. We can, however, conceptualize the 3D intersections of 4th dimensional objects.

The actual structure of a tesseract is inconceivable to us, but we can model it’s third dimensional plane. Similarly for a 2D experience, only the 2D intersection of a 3D object could be perceived. Based on the behaviour of that 3D object intersecting with a 2D plane, a 2D creature could figure out that the 2D object was in fact an intersection of a 3D object. So we can use lower dimensional intersections to conceive of higher dimensional structures.

Imagine a cone passing through a sheet of paper vertically. You’d see an expanding circle in 2D. From that, you could try to deduce and explain the expanding of the circle and possibly conclude it’s actually a higher dimensional structure intersecting with your plane.

Put that same cone slightly on its side and pass it through vertically and it would be an expanding ellipse — you might then accidentally describe two different 3D structures from a 2D perspective, even though it’s actually the same cone.

Pass a fork through, though, and it would be just the small circles of the fork’s tines visible in the 2D intersection. It would be all but impossible to conceive of those 4 circles being one object in a higher dimension. Pass the fork through sideways and you’d see this disappearing and reappoint long rectangle. You’d have to have a lot of data to surmise that these two experience are in fact connected to each other in the third dimension in one object. But the actual shape of the fork would likely remain a total mystery, ad certainly would not be possible to create or draw in the lower dimension. At best you’d have abstract mathematical models that could simulate the behaviour of the higher dimensional object in your dimensional plane.