Mystery from Another World--MHA

More Lore about Dimension Jumping

After part 27 where Shine told Shinso and Mei how her portaling works, I realized the explanation just didn't cover it fully. Though Shine explains more throughout the story, I thought I'd put it all here so people don't have to piece it together over time, like the students do. 😉

Also so they can refer back to this any time the rules of DJ-ing are brought up.

So, I've spent years developing my version of portals and dimensional travel theory, and I'm still working on it, but what I've worked out so far is as follows:

WHAT ARE PORTALS?

I've made the comparison between a portal and a tesseract. In most sci-fi, they are pretty much the same thing, but a tesseract tends to be more unstable. Think of the one in the Avengers.

I first learned about Tesseracts from Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle In Time, but the term was coined by C. H. Hinton in his book about the Fourth Dimension.

A Tesseract is a cube that has been squared, like you could take a number to the 4th power. The theory is a solid object could be squared too, if we followed mathematical logic.

The reason that creates a portal is a little more complicated.

In Abbott's Flatland, a 2D person is transported by a 3D person into the world of solids, and the 3D person can reach into the 2D world and go through what are walls and solid objects to them, because it's all laid out like a flat diagram. Just like we could look at the blueprint of a house and put a pencil into any room of the house. To us there is no roof. 

Because all the roofs in Flatland point north, like on a map, they are not roofs to the solid object but lines. We would get the same effect if we pointed to a map hanging on the wall.

Other scientists have applied this logic to the 4th dimensions: that a 4D being could move through solid objects the way we can move through flat ones. Our walls would not be walls to them. Our doors would not be doors. They would be as useless as flat lines are for keeping us out. Just like a parking line doesn't actually keep us from physically parking over it-- you have to choose to park inside it. But if you hit a wall, you will be stopped from parking inside it. A wall is 3D so it can stop you, a 3D person, but a 2D line is not a barrier to us. We can step over it or on it like nothing.

A 4D being would be as unlimited as we are, but in our world, with our rules.

From this scientific hypothesis (which now is starting to be proven by Quantum Physics to be at least partially grounded in fact, by the way) people have created the idea of the tesseract.

If a solid object, a square in this case, could be raised to another power physically, it could move through our world freely. It could got through a wall or fly or be outside of time.

In the Avengers Movies, this concept is very on the nose because the tesseract is actually shaped like a cube that can teleport people. However, you could not actually see a real tesseract as an ordinary cube with our eyes. People can imagine it but that's all. It's not possible to create it in the physical world...yet. As far as we know.

But for the purpose of sci-fi world travel, authors have taken it a different way.

HOW DO PEOPLE USE A TESSERACT/PORTAL

In A Wrinkle In Time, we find a tesseract is combined with the idea of  spiritual beings able to transcend our reality. In that story, humans are able to use a tesseract but very clumsily, and it's out of control, and they end up getting hurt doing it.  Because humans are not 4D beings.

But a being who is a 4D can transport the 3 kids in the story, safely, through other dimensions, just like the 3D being in flatland can lift the Square up into the 3rd dimension. Once we are outside of it, we can pull someone else up into it.