Tesseract and Time Travel Skip to main content
2012-2013 Season

Tesseract and Time Travel

In A Wrinkle In Time, the children use a process called tessing to teleport to different worlds and dimensions Below you will find a little more information on how modern science explains what a Tesseract is and how wormholes function.

Tesseract concept

Tesseract as a 3D model

In mathematics, a tesseract is a four-dimensional shape (hypercube) that, when represented in three dimensions, looks, e.g., like a cube inside of a cube with spokes connecting the corners of the two cubes together. In the novel, the tesseract functions more or less like what in modern science-fiction is called a space warp or a wormhole, a portal from one area of space to another which is possible through the bending of the structure of the space-time continuum. A similar concept occurs in Frank Herbert’s Dune novel where it is called the Holtzman effect.

Wormhole / Time travel 

A wormhole, also known as an Einstein-Rosen Bridge is a hypothetical topological feature of space-time that would be, fundamentally, a “shortcut” through space-time. For a simple visual explanation of a wormhole, consider space-time visualized as a two-dimensional (2D) surface. If this surface is folded along a third dimension, it allows one to picture a wormhole “bridge”. (Please note, though, that this is merely a visualization displayed to convey an essentially unvisualisable structure existing in 4 or more dimensions. The parts of the wormhole could be higher-dimensional analogues for the parts of the curved 2D surface; for example, instead of mouths which are circular holes in a 2D plane, a real wormhole’s mouths could be spheres in 3D space.) A wormhole is, in theory, much like a tunnel with two ends each in separate points in space-time.

Related Articles

data-content-type="article"

“That’s How Things Are”: The Weight of Waiting in The Cherry Orchard

March 20, 2025 03:10 PM
Near the end of his life, Anton Chekhov who had suffered from tuberculosis and depression throughout his life, decided to move to the seaside town of Yalta in order to heal. On January 18, 1904, he wrote to his wife, the actress Olga Knipper, “I’m writing The Cherry Orchard very slowly. Sometimes I feel it’s a success, sometimes a failure…It’s all very ordinary, but that’s how things are, unfortunately.”
overrideBackgroundColorOrImage= overrideTextColor= promoTextAlignment= overrideCardHideSection= overrideCardHideByline= overrideCardHideDescription= overridebuttonBgColor= overrideButtonText= promoTextAlignment=
data-content-type="article"

Study Guide for The Cherry Orchard

March 11, 2025 10:53 AM
For this production we are trying something new! You'll still see some dramaturgical information in your printed program, including the dramaturg's note, "The Weight of Waiting in The Cherry Orchard."
overrideBackgroundColorOrImage= overrideTextColor= promoTextAlignment= overrideCardHideSection= overrideCardHideByline= overrideCardHideDescription= overridebuttonBgColor= overrideButtonText= promoTextAlignment=
data-content-type="article"

The Story Behind Alabama Story

February 26, 2025 03:14 PM
Alabama Story, playwright Kenneth Jones’ six-actor, one-set drama about censorship, book banning, Civil Rights and American characters in “the Deep South of the imagination,” had its world premiere by Pioneer Theatre Company in Salt Lake City, Utah in January of 2015.
overrideBackgroundColorOrImage= overrideTextColor= promoTextAlignment= overrideCardHideSection= overrideCardHideByline= overrideCardHideDescription= overridebuttonBgColor= overrideButtonText= promoTextAlignment=