The FOURTH DIMENSION by Terri-Anne & Jo Sanning
Question: Which Legionnaire is the most alien? If you answered Chameleon Boy, Brainiac 5 or even Proty II... guess again -- the answer may surprise you! After you read this essay, though, it should become clear to you that the Legionnaire in question happens to be... Phantom Girl! Read on to discover why..! According to the lore, Tinya Wazzo comes from the fourth-dimensional world of Bgztl, and is herself (quite naturally) four-dimensional. This means that, while in the third dimension, she can move "through" walls and objects that are solid to three-dimensional beings. But what exactly does this mean? When we are speaking of physical dimensions, we are referring to (in the third dimension) the length, height, and breadth (or depth) of an object. These three planes at right angles to each other give us three different freedoms of motion: back and forth (depth), side to side (length) and up and down (height). A straight line only moves in one direction but if you extrude it at a right angle you end up with a square. Similarly, if you extrude a square at a right angle to itself you end up with a cube, and so on. Everything within our senses exists with these same three dimensions. But now, science has proven mathematically that there are even more dimensions than the three that we experience! Naturally, it is easier for people to comprehend this on paper with numbers than trying to imagine them visually. But, what the heck -- Let's try anyway! :) Figure 1.1 is a 2D representation of what a 3D cube looks like. Figure 1.2 shows the same cube, but unfolded into the second dimension (in this case, no depth).
As you can see from the diagrams, the six sides of a cube in the 3rd dimension end up looking like a cross of six square "rooms" in the 2nd dimension. To make a third dimensional object, one "merely" has to fold the second dimension and wrap it around an invisible hyper-space (inside the box). It's like in the ancient days when people thought that the world was flat to their senses and that by journeying far enough in one direction, a person could fall of the edge of world. On maps today, the globe is "squished" out like a peeled orange skin to be shown in more practical two dimensions. Yet we all know today that the Earth is really 3 dimensional, and when we look at the flat map we mentally convert the flat representation into the visualization of a sphere! If the Legionnaires received a call from a planet and were told to escort important officials, they would need to know exactly where to meet these people in three dimensional spatial coordinates - represented on a map as the x, y and z axes. But they would also need to know WHEN to meet in order to carry out their mission. If they turned up at the right place but at the wrong time, they may be too late to save the people they were assigned to protect. So in this way, time can be seen as the fourth dimension, but...
The numbering system of 1,2, etc. was created to refer to the number of dimensions an object has in space. Time is a dimension but a temporal one, and not spatial. Most beings (Superboy, Supergirl, Mon-El and Time-Bubble occupants withstanding) have no degree of freedom within the temporal dimension; they are as driftwood on a river, ever moving 'forward', with the past always behind them and the future always ahead. So added to the dimensions of length, height, and depth, time is a fourth dimension but not the fourth dimension. So how does one envision the fourth dimension? How can we wrap the third dimension around hyperspace? What shape is made when you move a cube at a right angle to the x, y and z axes? Well, the answer is a hyper-cube (also called a tesseract). In 1940, science-fiction author Robert A. Heinlein wrote his classic short story "He Built A Crooked House", which showed how a clever architect designed a house in the shape of a "shadow of a hyper-cube". It was very much like our unfolded cube in Figure 1.2, only as 8 three-dimensional cubes/rooms built at right angles to each other (see Figure 1.3). After an earth tremor collapses the unstable building "into itself", the result is a hyper-cube (see Figure 1.4), taking up less 3D space to our 3D eyes but with the same volume inside since the extra space has been extruded into the 4th dimension.
The original Legion clubhouse must have been built using 4th dimensional construction techniques since it appears quite small from the outside (sometimes no bigger than an elevator car!) yet on the inside, it holds a vast number of chambers in larger proportions. Just as a 3-dimensional object or person casts a 2-dimensional shadow, so does the clubhouse's 4D interior cast a 3D "shadow" in our own dimension. So where does this leave lovely Tinya Wazzo? Well, if she is really a 4th-dimensional being, then it means that her fellow Legionnaires and teammates can only glimpse the shadow of her true self, which is much vaster than three-dimensional senses can understand or appreciate (well, maybe Ultra Boy comes close! ;) Tinya's hyper-body, and the hyper-body of anyone else from Bgztl, extends into an area of space that is at right angles to this universe's three-dimensional planes. (Talk about an inter-dimensional romance!) (By the way, Bgztl is pronounced BIG-zeh-til. Apparently, 3D beings can't even see 4D vowels! 5D vowels either, in the case of Mxyzptlk, which is pronounced Mix-yez-PIT-el-ik ;)
To see how Phantom Girl accomplishes her "dematerialization", one can put themselves into her shoes, er, tights, by imagining that they, a 3-dimensional person, are visiting the 2nd dimension. (And, for the sake of example, let's assume that this is a reality in which there is no height - no "up" and no "down"). To the 2D beings in that dimension, you would appear much as they to their senses. You would have length and depth, a circumference of shape, but they would not see the "higher" you. They could not see your height! You, conversely, would possess the extra-sensory ability to "see" through objects by looking at them from your hyper-dimensional vantage point. Their buildings would be roofless, looking much like house plans or blueprints to your 4D eyes. This is an ability that Phantom Girl has demonstrated in the lore. When she walks through solid objects, while there is no light inside, she can still "see" where she is going. In Adventure No. 333, Tinya was able to see the inscriptions on a metal tablet though it was trapped between geologic layers of sediment. There was no light, but then her four-dimensional eyes see in a greater depth than is illuminated by 3D light. Conversely, Tinya is unaffected by dazzling 3D light-rays while in phantom form (Adventure Comics No. 339). In Lois Lane No. 50, Tinya herself says: "Since I come from the 4th dimensional world of Bgztl, which co-exists in the same space as Earth, I can see through objects, as well as pass through them..." In that story, Phantom Girl sees that the cause of one man's maniacal moods were due to a blood-clot pressing on a nerve. She then materialized her hand and cured him of his personality disorder with a neck message. Back to our example... Say you, a 3D person in a 2D world, wanted to enter a building without using a door. All you would have to do is step over it. As "over" does not exist to 2D eyes, all they would see is you "disappearing" from their field of vision, apparently cutting through the wall itself -- but you are not moving "through" the wall as much as you are circumventing it entirely! In 1884, Edwin A. Abbott wrote his classic tale of inter-dimensional experience: "Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions", which was in part a mathematical treatise on the nature of spatial dimensions, as well as a social commentary as to the inequality of the sexes and the way religion suppresses thought. In the story, a Square from Flatland is visited by a Sphere from Spaceland. To the Square with no height, the sphere appeared to be a circle with a varying circumference. What the Sphere was really doing was moving up and down, but as it did so, it would pass through the floor, thus altering it's size to the point of view of the Square (see diagrams below).
For Phantom Girl, in the 3D world, to move through an object Earth people call "solid", she merely has to move in a direction that is at right angles to our reality. Scientists call the degrees of movement in the fourth direction ana and kata, which is the equivalent option to Tinya as left-right, forwards-backwards, and up-down are to us. In other words, in our world, Phantom Girl is nothing more than super-agile! This is the way Phantom Girl's power was originally conceived by writers. In 1959, the sci-fi film "the 4D Man" came out, which dealt with a man's newfound ability to walk through walls (of course, this movie had a horror/vampire twist to it!). The original nature of Tinya's power was based on her extra-dimensional physiology. She and all people from Bgztl can not pass through 4th dimensional objects. To them they are as solid as 3D objects are to us. She only has a "super-power" by virtue of being in a lesser dimension, much like Superboy does not gain his powers until he is exposed to a yellow sun. What happened in the early '70s under the scripting of Cary Bates, who did not understand the characters and their abilities nor did he pay any attention to past lore, was that the nature of Phantom Girl's power was ditched completely. Instead, he had the inhabitants of Bgztl being able to turn into phantoms while in their own dimension! This error should have been overlooked along with his many others but was not and so the wonderful exploration of physics and theory was lost to future writers. Today, Bgztl is just a world populated by people who just happen to be able to turn into phantoms, just as Cargg is a world populated by people who can split into three bodies. The 4th dimensional nature of the planet is ignored, and it has simply become a "parallel dimension", irrelevant to physical geometry. But back to the original Phantom Girl... Through practice, Tinya has learned to turn only selective parts of her body immaterial (Adventure Comics No. 340). Conversely, when she is a phantom, she can turn parts of herself solid, as when she makes her fist solid to punch opponents (360), a trick she learned in order to be more effective in a fight. This "trick" is accomplished by only moving that selective part of her body, such as her hand or arm, in an ana or kata direction. Whenever Phantom Girl becomes immaterial, an invisible aura of force around her body affects anything she wears or carries in the same way. She can only affect small objects she can carry in one hand (Adventure Comics No. 334, 360, 337 "The Legion Outpost"). The "invisible aura" spoken of is Tinya's own larger 4th-dimensional body, inside of which she can pull small objects with her in an ana or kata direction. To the 3-D eye, when Tinya is moving ana or kata, she appears more transparent since she is traveling at a right-angle direction that Earthlings are incapable of perceiving correctly. So now we know what happens when a 4-dimensional person visits us down in the lowly 3D worlds. But what if the reverse happened and a 3D person was to visit Bgztl? Well, while the Legionnaires have never been to Bgztl, they have travelled to many "weird" dimensions in their journeys, including Mxyzptlk's planet Zrfff in the 5th dimension (Adventure Comics No. 351) and they even once took a journey through the 10th dimension (361)! What they saw in those higher dimensions was only what their own bodies and senses were equipped to see. In other words, they only saw a 3D world yet with strange oddities. On Zrfff, for example, things appear to be "whacked-out", with inverted buildings, nonsensical geometries and oddly behaving people. But to the inhabitants of Zrfff, everything is normal, and they, in fact, view the 3D world as ludicrously simplistic.
Perhaps this explains the seemingly impossible "magic" that Mxyzptlk exerts over Metropolis and poor "outclassed" Superman! Mxy is two dimensions beyond Superman's understanding and even one beyond Phantom Girl's. In Dimension No. 10, the Legionnaires only "saw" a compressed universe, where travel over the alien terrain covered only miles by their 3D standards, yet translated to a journey of countless light years in the third dimension! By virtue of their 3-dimensionality, the Legionnaires would view Tinya's home world as looking much like Earth, but they are not seeing the entire picture. Their "limited" senses do not see a vastly larger and more complex world and people. Bgztl is said to "coexist unseen in the same space that Earth occupies" (Adventure Comics No. 316) and "occupy the same space as Earth but in another dimension" (365). What this means is that if we convert our above model of the hyper-cube (Figure 1.4) to a hyper-sphere more like a planet (we don't want to bring in the cubed Bizarro-World, here), Earthlings would walk around on the inner sphere, while Bgztlings would walk around on the outer sphere. Well, that's a simple way of putting it! Neither people would be aware of the other or the other world. They would be invisible to each other in much the same way that the 2-dimensional world is invisible to us. We can draw out representations of it, but even a drawing has height (the molecules of the graphite creating a thin layer on top of the paper). No implement in today's 3-dimensional world can create a 2-dimensional object and the same goes for the higher dimensions. Yet the two dimensions can affect each other physically by means of a sufficiently powerful explosive blast, which will reverberate across the spatial dimensions connecting Earth and Bgztl. Consequently, Tinya can be affected by shock waves. If knocked unconscious while in her phantom form PG reverts back to (3D relative) solid form (Adventure Comics No. 346) because in either dimension it is her nature to be surrounded by a solid environment. As we mentioned earlier, 30th century technology is advanced. Travel through the dimension of time has been achieved and 4D construction allows for the more efficient use of space. Advanced and painless surgery is performed using implements such as 4th dimensional forceps that allow curative capsules to be placed inside patients without penetrating the skin (Adventure Comics No. 303). Since the Legion clubhouse is really a hyper-cylindrical building, part of it goes into the 4th dimension and may have made it easier for Tinya Wazzo to discover the Legion and traverse to the 3rd dimension. Travel between dimensions would be naturally set up so that visitors can enter a building from a fourth-dimensional door and leave through a three-dimensional one. The Legion had security defenses against 3D beings in the third dimension, but hadn't considered the fourth! But 4th-dimensional beings cannot pass through 3D walls charged with "anti-phantom energy" (Adventure Comics No. 376 "The Legion Outpost"). PG charged the outer Legion clubhouse walls with such a radiation when she made it phantom proof back when she first joined the team (Superboy No. 147, Adventure Comics No. 377 "The Legion Outpost"). Anti-phantom energy is simply a force-field generated using 4th-dimensional energy, and therefore impassable to 4D beings. For the use of beings of all dimensions needing to transport themselves into higher dimensions, there are a number of top-priority dimensional-warp machines (or "gateways") at Metropolis Spaceport which allow high-security personnel to make trans-dimensional journeys (Adventure Comics No. 361). And super-beings like Superboy, Supergirl and Mon-El, of course, can traverse the multitude of dimensions and parallel universes using their own phenomenal super-powers! In lieu of the traditional prison, Kryptonians punished their criminals by placing them inside the eerie twilight dimension known as "the Phantom Zone" to serve out their sentences. While inside the Zone, villains could move without the limitations of distance, travelling anywhere in the 3D universe with but a thought. Likewise, the inhabitants could observe the passage of time through 3rd-dimensional planets, yet not be touched by temporal effects themselves. But they also could not physically interact with the peoples in time and space - unless they could first remove themselves from the Zone and into normal time-space, which was impossible without the proper conditions. It may not necessarily have been more humane of the Kryptonian Council to put them there. The Phantom Zone is a place outside the traditional dimensions of both time and space, a place where only thoughts seem to exist. It is a boundary between the 3rd and 4th dimensions yet it is still a place that can be travelled to and from. A Kryptonian Phantom Zone projector takes a body and shifts it into the twilight dimension between the 3rd and 4th space-dimensions, where it is a part of neither space. Since a 3-dimensional being cannot physically move in any direction that is higher than their 3 dimensions, they are effectively trapped. A higher 4th-dimensional being, such as Phantom Girl, can still be sent into the Zone against her will by the use of a Phantom Zone Projector (Adventure Comics No. 325), but because they can take a step "down" in the lesser-dimensional direction, they may escape the confines of the Zone!
While in the Zone, Tinya gains all the "powers" a person outside of time and space and in the Phantom Zone has. She can communicate telepathically like all the phantoms within and view events occurring in the lower 3rd dimension. She can also travel by thought to any place in the universe within moments while she is within the Zone. In this manner, she could actually effectively "teleport" great spatial distances if she entered the Zone from one planet in the universe and then exited the Zone - virtually instantly - on any other planet! Which is quite a power to have and one she has never been shown using, perhaps because getting lost in the eerie dimension is always a risk for someone who is not well versed in traveling the misty realm. Kryptonian criminals have had time to master movement within the Zone but perhaps no one is more expert at the workings of the Zone than the Legion's own Mon-El, who unfortunately had to spend over a thousand years there! By now, one begins to see that there is more to Phantom Girl than meets the eye! Each added dimension brings a greater complexity to the whole. And then there is also more to our own lives than can be perceived with the five senses anyway. Three-dimensional beings have more to them than just height, width and depth. There is the metaphysical "measurements" to consider as well - astral bodies, the human spirit, the hyper-self - but then, that subject would probably rate a whole other essay! But on a purely physical level, we hope we have justified our answer as to how Phantom Girl rates the distinction of being the most exotic Legionnaire! For more information about Phantom Girl, visit her biography page in ROLL CALL! Abbott, Edwin Abbott. Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. 1884. Rucker, Rudy. The Fourth Dimension. 1984. Dox, Querl. Bisecting the Fourth Dimension. 2984 (Pre-order your copy today! ;) |
Although many people assume the fourth
dimension to be time, dimensions really cannot be
numbered in sequence (who's to say that the first
dimension is height and not length or depth?). While time
is an added dimension that plays an important role in the
state of an object or person, this is true of objects of
one, two or four dimensions and not just three. 
4D people from
the 4D world of Bgztl appear to do the physically
impossible and walk through solid objects. When one
understands the principles of 4D space, this feat is less
complex than one would guess but nonetheless fascinating.
At the same
time, in order for Tinya to enter the Zone, she has to
concentrate greatly, so it's no easy task. If Tinya
stepped too far, she would merely be moving from the 4th
dimension into the 3rd and surpassing the twilight
dimension entirely. It is as if she must become a
tightrope walker and straddle the tenuous twilight area
between dimensions 3 and 4. So it is only with intense
concentration that she can do something the Phantom Zone
prisoners can't - enter or leave the Zone, at will.