Scientific American March 2019

“…An image? […] it could never really have five dimensions: length, width, height, ifth and oofth: at least that’s what I think…” These are the words used by scientist Oliver Farnsworth to describe one of his most unreal inventions: a mysterious 5-dimensional hypercube (penteract) machine. Ignoring the actual nature of the additional dimensions, Walter Tevis’ novel character pulls these two names out of the air to describe them. He will later discover that the fourth dimension (ifth) is nothing but time, and oofth is a sort of alternative time.