Hadley’s Primer

I’m working out lessons to teach how to think in 3D. Here’s one of the first ideas for this. I got to watching Jodie Foster’s movie Contact. And came to the segment where Hadley reveals the primer to Ellie:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SbKE_U4b7U

Director Robert Zemeckis needed to explain the idea without detailing the depths that an efficient data set could get to. It gets neat when we replicate the Hadley Primer into a 3D library with many books, layers and leaves:

This is Zemeckis’ version:

Now imagine the underlay also being a book, inverted:

Now imagine Zemeckis’ book as a level-1 hypercube [a tesseract projected into three-space]:

 

Now imagine it as a multi-layered hypercube…3D books nested within books within books…

Now imagine what lies at the “centre” of the nestlings… 

Is it “the centre”? Is it a singularity? Is it a cloud of data? Can we ever get there?

A book with infinitive leaves that “linear we” cannot perceive? 

Words in a starry firmament? Words that we cannot truly read?

Yet…