Reverse Engineering the 4D Shape of a Plant
This is a draft. I just started it, so it is rough. I am thinking out loud here, the same way I did in the cross-section post, and you may want to read that one first. Some of this only makes sense with pictures, so I will build more interactive things over time to go with it.
We must exist in 4D
Quick recap of where I landed before. If the universe is one, and we exist, then somehow we must also exist in a 4D way. There is no way to build a true 2D being. You might say a line of atoms, but that is still wrong, because atoms are made of other things, so you can never have a line of something with zero thickness, which is what 2D would actually require. So no matter what you do, you must exist in 4D.
And the thought that follows: maybe everything is static. A 4D world that just sits there, complete. Time would only be the way you slide your 3D cross section through it. So could time be the gift to life? Without it everything would be frozen, and maybe there would be no life at all. I am not sure that is the right question, but I want to leave it on the table.
The electron a kilometer away
Here is something I have carried since high school. At the time I thought it was a stupid idea. The double slit experiment. You fire electrons, you get a probability distribution, and then the moment one is detected the whole thing collapses to a single point.
I used to picture the electron as a little ball floating around, with a probability cloud that has fat tails, tails that basically extend forever. So there is a tiny but nonzero chance the electron is a kilometer away. Then you detect it at the wall, and the probability collapses right there, instantly. So what happens to the part of it that was a kilometer away? Either it moves there impossibly fast, or it was never really moving at all.
That is the moment that always bothered me. And it makes me wonder if quantum weirdness is what it looks like when you start observing things that are really about 4D, things that live at the intersection of 3D and 4D. Kind of like the sphere passing through the 2D plane: the flat being sees a circle appear from nothing and vanish, and calls it strange, because it has no access to the dimension the motion is actually happening in.
Rare does not mean rare
If that is what is going on, then these phenomena are not rare. We just say rare because our sensors cannot capture them. They might be extremely common. We are made out of sensors, and the sensors we have read electromagnetism in a pretty trivial way. So of course most of what is out there would be invisible to us.
I want to be honest about the obvious limit here. This whole line of thinking assumes that everything runs on the physics we already know, and on the forces we can perceive. There are four fundamental forces that I know of: gravity, electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force, and the weak nuclear force. If there are others, ones we cannot perceive at all, then we are not just missing data, we are missing the ability to even form the question. So the most I can do is try to comprehend the edge of what I know I do not comprehend. Known unknowns. The unknown unknowns are, by definition, somewhere I cannot point.
Is a plant even a thing?
Now the part I actually wanted to get to. Take a plant. A small one, not a tree. I can watch it live and die. I can experience its life and its death.
Say I 3D scan it, and I scan it at every moment in time. Could I use all those scans to reverse engineer the shape of the plant in 4D? Each scan is one 3D slice. Stack the slices along time and you start to get the 4D object whose cross sections they are.
But then a stranger question opens up. Does 4D even have a concept of a plant? Because if in 4D there is no time, and time is just the sliding of the cross section, then the plant and its atoms are the same thing. There is no such thing as a plant. The plant is just a snapshot of the universe. A single thing. There are not multiple things. The many things we see are the representation of one thing, sliced.
You would have to scan the whole universe
And here is why scanning just the plant is wrong, wrong from first principles. To reverse engineer the true 4D object, I should not take only the shape of the plant. I should take a snapshot of the entire universe, from the beginning of time until now. That is the only honest way to recover the equivalence.
Think of it like a cube being rotated through our 3D space. If I only see the slices, I can still work backwards and figure out how much of that cube has passed through, and reconstruct a fair amount of it. And if I am lucky, and the 4D shape has some symmetry, then once I have a piece of it I can derive the rest. A sphere from a single slice. A cube from a few faces.
I am visualizing all of this in my head as I write it, and I can already tell it is hard to follow without images. So I will build it. Interactive pages you can actually play with, until the idea stops living only in my head.
Last meaningful edit: 1 June 2026.