The Fourth Dimension is a non-fiction

Non-fiction

Non-fiction is the form of any narrative, account, or other communicative work whose assertions and descriptions are understood to be fact...

 work written by Rudy Rucker

Rudy Rucker

Rudolf von Bitter Rucker is an American mathematician, computer scientist, science fiction author, and philosopher, and is one of the founders of the cyberpunk literary movement. The author of both fiction and non-fiction, he is best known for the novels in the Ware Tetralogy, the first two of...

, the Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley is a term which refers to the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area in Northern California in the United States. The region is home to many of the world's largest technology corporations...

 professor of mathematics and computer science, and was published in 1984 by Houghton Mifflin. The book is subtitled as a guided tour of the higher universes. The foreword included is by Martin Gardner

Martin Gardner

Martin Gardner was an American mathematics and science writer specializing in recreational mathematics, but with interests encompassing micromagic, stage magic, literature , philosophy, scientific skepticism, and religion...

, and the 200+ illusrations are by David Povilaitis. Like other books by Rucker, The Fourth Dimension is dedicated to Edwin Abbott Abbott

Edwin Abbott Abbott

Edwin Abbott Abbott , English schoolmaster and theologian, is best known as the author of the satirical novella Flatland .-Biography:...

, author of the novella Flatland

Flatland

Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions is an 1884 satirical novella by the English schoolmaster Edwin Abbott Abbott. Writing pseudonymously as "A Square", Abbott used the fictional two-dimensional world of Flatland to offer pointed observations on the social hierarchy of Victorian culture...

.

Synopsis

The Fourth Dimension guides you on a mind-expanding journey; the book is designed to alter the reader's perceptions of the universe through the exploration of a fourth dimension (a fourth physical dimension, rather than the simpler notion of time as a fourth dimension). The information gives the reader a much better understanding of the concept of higher dimensions, whose existence must be presumed in order to complete some of the mathematical equations of quantum mechanics. Abbott's Flatland is put to use by means of analogies, which are used throughout the book. Rucker compares how a square in Flatland would react to a cube in Spaceland to how a cube in Spaceland would react to a hypercube

Hypercube

In geometry, a hypercube is an n-dimensional analogue of a square and a cube . It is a closed, compact, convex figure whose 1-skeleton consists of groups of opposite parallel line segments aligned in each of the space's dimensions, perpendicular to each other and of the same length.An...

 from the fourth dimension.

In addition to the 200 pages of the guided tour of the higher universes, many puzzles (see mental-skill game) are included to help the reader gain the mental tools necessary to envisioning a fourth dimension.