To answer your two immediate questions right now; yes, you read that correctly and, yes, I’m serious. Literally every movie that has ever been made anywhere on this planet, from backyard indie projects to perennial Hollywood money printers such as The Fast and the Furious series, has been at least a 3D movie. Furthermore, every movie that will ever be made will be, at minimum, a 3D movie. “But Dan, how can that even be possible? Will the scientists of tomorrow invent a way for movie characters to materialize like Yu-Gi-Oh monsters or something” a confused reader may ask. I hate to say that the answer has nothing to do with Seto Kaiba. Even better than relying on a fictional tech billionaire obsessed with crushing those he deems as weak, the answer has been in front of us the entire time!
Yes, kind reader, you have been duped and lied to. You have fallen for a marketing gimmick every time that you donned a pair of flimsy red-blue glasses or a more modern hard-plastic and tinted-gray set of spectacles. This is because the Marketing Industrial Complex doesn’t want you to know about the true dimensions that exist in our universe. Similarly, it appears that our nations physics teachers have let us down. Though fear not, for I, the man who brought you The Case Against Memes am here to show you the truth.
It looks like I’ll have to start actually using my STEM degree and start dropping knowledge. Alright students, class is in session, so it’s time to put away your Adderall. Most of you are already familiar with two dimensions already; the x-axis (left-and-right on a piece of paper) and the y-axis (top-to-bottom on a piece of paper). When someone says that something is 2D, these are the two dimensions that they are referring to, and they are correct. Every graph you’ve ever looked at, every online article you’ve ever read, every family photo of that over-sharing colleague has insisted on showing you despite your subtle-yet-polite protests to the contrary have all existed on an x-axis and a y-axis.
There exists another plane of movement as well, the lesser discussed z-axis. The z-axis is the vertical plane, which is to say lifting your pencil off of the paper is moving in the z-axis, as is tunneling underground. The z-axis is the third dimension that has been so heavily marketed by Hollywood on-and-off for decades, and they are technically correct in the fact the movie is presented in these three dimensions: the x-axis being the horizontal part of the screen, the y-axis being the vertical part of the screen, and the z-axis being the monster/projectile/hand/whatever that comes out towards the viewer when they are wearing those uncomfortable and unsanitary glasses.
“But Dan, you said that we’ve been lied to! Everything you’ve said this far has been exactly what they have claimed, so what gives?” a frustrated student will bellow out in class. Settle down before I start assigning extra homework on some trumped-up charge! We’re ready to continue? Good. Technically speaking, Hollywood hasn’t lied when they made the claim that the glasses-donning audiences were in for a 3D treat. If anything, they undersold the number of dimensions featured in their film. I see that caught your attention! This is because there is a fourth dimension that is ever present in every movie that you have ever seen, every online article you’ve read, and so on. That dimension is time.
That’s right; time. Time has progressed while every movie has been watched, every article has been read (jokes on me; my articles don’t get read!), and every image that has ever been viewed. So, even in movies that lacked any projectiles shooting towards the special glasses-equipped audience, time, the x-axis and the y-axis were all present. Therefore, every movie ever made has been a 3D movie, because those three dimensions were present. Ditto for images and articles as well. So, movies that featured ridiculous glasses and objects shooting out in the z-axis were technically 4D movies! Honestly, I’m kind of shocked that some studio exec didn’t figure that out and start marketing the hell out of that way sooner. I’ll take my MBA now!
“But Dan, what about the fifth dimension? Every cool sci-fi movie I watch/video game I play/ dystopic book I read keeps mentioning that, so what is it?” Alright, we have some class time left, so I’ll field this one question. The fifth dimensions is…whatever the hell the author of those works wanted it to be, because it doesn’t actually exist. That’s right, it’s made up. Just like the Shadow Realm or the idea that the U.S. government will actually pay back its foreign debt. Disappointed? Good; then that means I thoroughly de-bunked a myth. Well, would you look at the time, class is dismissed!
“You dedicated an entire class to be smug about a technicality?” an annoyed student stated as he approached my desk after the bell. Yes, I did. “Well, I’m going to drop this bullshit course and switch my major to art!” Fantastic kid; don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out. But on a grander scale, this lack of awareness of time being a dimension exists because it isn’t being hammered home in our nation’s high school math classrooms. When our students (the real ones, who exist outside of this article!) go out into the world, diploma in hand, more often than not they aren’t scientifically literate. Hence, they fall for situations like a political candidate saying I’ve changed my views 360 degrees on this issue (credit to Neil deGrasse Tyson for that example). This inevitably leads to people conflating average with median (a major pet peeve of mine) and not understanding the difference between theory and hypothesis. The latter example becomes important when some science-denier throws out the 75-IQ quip of Well, evolution is just a theory, not realizing that theory in this specific context basically means highest level of widespread acceptance within the scientific community. How the hell does Dr. Tyson make debunking nonsense look so easy?
Did you enjoy my class today? Don’t mention it! No seriously, don’t tell my mother, she won’t stop bugging me about a career pivot into teaching…
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