Doğruluk Payı fact-check: Is the image shared as ‘the clearest image of the 4th dimension’ real?

According to the investigation by Doğruluk Payı, the ring-shaped animation shared on social media with the caption “the clearest image of the fourth dimension agreed upon by scientists” is not a scientific discovery or a recording of the 4th dimension.

The investigation noted that while the image gives the impression of a scientific visualization due to its starry and granular texture, there is no evidence in open sources that this image appears as an “image of the 4th dimension” in any scientific paper, university announcement, or institutional record like those from NASA.

HOW IS THE 4TH DIMENSION ADDRESSED?

In daily experience, three spatial dimensions are perceived: length, width, and depth. In physics, when the “fourth dimension” is mentioned, it usually refers to the dimension of time. Beyond this, some physics theories mathematically discuss the possibility of an additional spatial direction separate from time.

In two separate studies published in Nature in 2018, researchers indirectly examined some physical effects expected in four-dimensional space within a laboratory environment. However, these studies do not mean that a photograph of the 4th dimension was taken; they are based on observing mathematical effects expected in four-dimensional systems within lower-dimensional setups.

Directly seeing a four-dimensional object is also considered impossible for human perception. For this reason, mathematicians and physicists mostly explain such structures through projections and computer models. The four-dimensional cube known as a “tesseract” can also be represented with drawings reduced to three dimensions.

The strongest open-source match found by Doğruluk Payı shows that the image was not used as a 4th-dimension representation, but rather in a GIF editing question posted on Mathematica Stack Exchange on September 24, 2023. The purpose of that post was to request Mathematica code to reverse the direction of a rotating animation and create a mirrored version of it.

Therefore, the image in the claim cannot be considered the “clearest image of the 4th dimension” agreed upon by scientists. Current information indicates that the image is not a scientific record, but an example of animation and visual processing.