We may not be able to step into the fourth dimension of space, but a new formulation of the physics of objects in many dimensions can help us understand what it would be like.

While it is fairly easy to picture a one-dimensional or two-dimensional object, and we interact with three-dimensional objects every day, making the leap into four dimensions is difficult. The 19th century novella Flatland imagined how beings on a 2D plane might perceive 3D objects , but scaling that up into more dimensions isn’t particularly intuitive.

Here in the …