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Chrissy has taught secondary English and history and writes online curriculum. She has an M.S.Ed. in Social Studies Education.
Imagine that a member of your family is working on a top-secret government project. Over time, letters and notes from that person become less and less frequent. Without warning, communication drops off completely. The government assures you that everything is fine. Where did your loved one go?
This is the reality for the Murry family in A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeline L'Engle. Mrs. Murry and her children, Meg and Charles Wallace, are left wondering and worrying about the missing Mr. Murry. Meg and Charles Wallace learn from two mysterious women, Mrs. Which and Mrs. Whatsit, that their physicist dad was working on a special type of space-and-time travel. While experimenting with traveling from Earth to Mars, Mr. Murry was captured. To make matters worse, he was imprisoned somewhere across the universe behind 'the darkness.' If you've ever watched the Discovery Channel or science-fiction movies, you may think of 'the darkness' as dark matter, or maybe even a black hole.
So, how exactly do they save Mr. Murry when he's hidden somewhere in the vastness of space? As you may know, space travel can take quite a long time. In our solar system, the planet Mars is considered relatively close to Earth, but it's still over 34 million miles away! Traveling at about 36,000 miles per hour, it can take about 39 days to get from Earth to Mars if the planets are at their closest points. The same journey can take over 280 days if the planets are at their furthest points. From Earth to Pluto, the furthest planet in our solar system, it can take over 10 years to travel over 4 billion miles. So how could Meg and Charles Wallace possibly save their father, especially if he's not even in the same solar system? According to Mrs. Which and Mrs. Whatsit, the answer is simple. All they need is a tesseract, something they describe as a 'wrinkle in time,' which is where the book gets its name.
Before you learn about the tesseract in A Wrinkle in Time, it's helpful to understand some basic geometry. You're probably familiar with the term 'three-dimensional,' but what are the three dimensions?
The first dimension is very simple; it's just a straight line. The second dimension can be thought of as a flat shape, like a square. The third dimension includes all shapes that have depth, like a cube. If you haven't figured it out yet, the world we live in is three-dimensional. You, your teacher, and the computer or smartphone you're using to watch this lesson are three-dimensional.
In standard geometry, the tesseract is a cube in the fourth dimension. The scientist Albert Einstein described it as time. As you can probably imagine, drawing what time looks like is pretty tricky! It's not something you can necessarily see. In A Wrinkle in Time, the concept of a tesseract is explained a bit differently.
So, you know that Mr. Murry is trapped somewhere in the universe. You also know that space travel can take a very long time, even within our own solar system. Mrs. Whatsit and Mrs. Which explain a workaround for these two seemingly impossible problems. In basic geometry, a line is the shortest distance between two points, however, Mrs. Which explains that there's an even better shortcut when traveling through space-time: the tesseract.
Mrs. Which explains the first three dimensions (a line, a square, and the cube) to Meg and Charles Wallace. She also explains that the fourth dimension is time. In L'Engle's book, the tesseract is the fifth dimension, a way to connect two distant points across both space and time. To explain the concept, Mrs. Which flattens out the fabric of her skirt, with one point on both ends of the fabric. She then folds her skirt in half, creating a wrinkle. This wrinkle brings the two points on her skirt right next to each other, shortening the amount of distance and time needed to travel between them.
The characters use the tesseract to travel across the universe, from place to place in a matter of minutes, instead of years, decades, or centuries. While Madeleine L'Engle's concept of the tesseract differs from the geometric concept of the tesseract, it's still very fascinating!
In A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeline L'Engle, the Murry family finds itself in a strange predicament. Mr. Murry, father to Meg and Charles Wallace, has mysteriously disappeared while working on a top-secret government project. From two odd women, Mrs. Which and Mrs. Whatsit, this family learns that Mr. Murry was captured while traveling through space and time to the planet Mars.
Mrs. Which explains to Meg and Charles Wallace that to find him and release him from captivity, they can use a tesseract, or a wrinkle in time. According to Mrs. Which, the tesseract is the fifth dimension that can shorten the distances across both time and space. In conventional geometry, the tesseract is actually considered a shape in the fourth dimension.
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A Wrinkle in Time Study Guide4 chapters | 40 lessons | 2 flashcard sets
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