Submitted by roohooreddit t3_11dxnwd in explainlikeimfive
Ojisan1 t1_jabll0e wrote
Reply to comment by iaintlyon in ELI5: What's at the edge of the universe? by roohooreddit
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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