marco's dad didn't it was the tip of a cone. he said it was the middle of the cone or something; basically where all the lines meet.
in normal space, we travel on the edge of the cone. in z-space, we travel through the cone.
Okay, I'm not going to lie his whole description was half sci-fi mumbo jumbo and half...actual maybe something real. I'll just post the important parts:
We've discovered what could be thought of as a whole new dimension, yet not a dimension at all. It's sort of like...Marco, you've studied conic sections, haven't you?
...You know what a cone looks like, right? Well, the surface of a cone is the two-dimensional analogue to the five-dimensional space we inhabit.
...While the surface of the cone is two-dimensional, the surface exists in three dimensions.
...The cone contains a singularity...a place where all lines intersect. The place where you can head out in any direction, or in all directions at once. Where you can move in any direction without moving anywhere at all.
...We live our lives on just one line on the cone, in a mere four dimensions, including time
...We've been stuck on the surface of the cone all this time. When we want to go anywhere, we have to travel on the line. But now, imagine someone notices the singularity. A point with no size, no breadth, no extent. The physical representation of nothingness. By itself, it's nothing. Yet it's the starting and ending place of everything! A multiplier of real space!
...What could you call it? Zero, I suppose. Zero-Space.
All right, so all of that jazz about five dimensions and the two-dimensional surface of the cone somehow adding with the three-dimensional space the cone inhabits makes no sense to me. But the stuff about the "singularity" does.
Here's my interpretation, and feel free to correct me if you think I'm wrong:
[img width= height=]http://i49.tinypic.com/2whmolu.png[/img]
All right, so like Marco's dad said, we live our lives on just one line of the cone. I've indicated that by the dotted line, Earth. Earth inhabits one specific vector on the cone. In real space, if you wanted to travel to another vector, say, the moon, you'd have to travel on the outside of the cone. Now, how far down from the tip of the cone you'd have to travel, and the width of the angle between vectors, I mean, ****, I don't know. This is a children's book series. Maybe the distance from the tip is real-space distance, the angle...ugh idk. But what it LOOKS like he's saying is that at the tip, all lines converge. That is the "nothing" point, where both nothing and everything exists simultaneously. And that, as I take it, is Zero-Space.
Now, like I said, if this was how it worked, then you could get anywhere in the galaxy instantaneously, assuming everything in our galaxy is part of the same "cone." But it really seems, through the series, the time it takes to get somewhere is still dependent on how far away you are from that place. So either that's inconsistent or I'm not understanding this right. Or this is a vast simplification of a *very advanced* scientific principle, much like Schrodinger's cat.
BUT IT'S FICTIONAL SO WHY SHOULDN'T THAT BE EXACTLY HOW IT IS?
i've always wondered that when the extra matter is sent to z-space (as in the mosquito incident), even when morphing something way smaller than yourself, what's the reason for it being a perfectly-formed human?
morphing isn't exactly pretty, i'd assume that the matter would just be sent to z-space in random parts. why would it be assembled as it was on earth?
...or am i completely missing something?
It's an *n-dimensional* human, all twisted and nasty and inside-out and right-side in, from what I remember. The Andalites reintegrated the bodies into 3-dimensional space when they brought them aboard their ship.
