Submitted by roohooreddit t3_11dxnwd in explainlikeimfive
iaintlyon t1_jabk6ga wrote
Reply to comment by Ojisan1 in ELI5: What's at the edge of the universe? by roohooreddit
Hm. So is there a hypothetical shape of the universe?
Ojisan1 t1_jabll0e wrote
That’s where it gets complicated. We don’t know because we can only observe 13.7 billion light years in every direction. So what we see is a sphere with us at the center. But there are some other things that suggest that the universe is a hypersphere or a hypertoroid.
It’s not possible for us to picture these objects except by approximation, or with math, or with analogies. But a short explanation: A sphere is a circle extended into an additional dimension. You can visualize that. A hypersphere is a sphere extended into an additional dimension. Can’t visualize it, but that’s what it means.
A torus is a donut shape, so a hypertoroid is a donut extended into an additional dimension.
There are videos about hypercubes, and hyperspheres, which attempt to help picture what it’s like, but because our minds operate in 3 dimensions, it’s not capable of truly comprehending these 4 dimensional objects.
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