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HYPERSPHERES AND TESSERACTS 113
How to Stuff a Whale into a Five-Dimensional Sphere
The answers to the previous six questions are: yes, yes, no, 100 percent, zero,
and zero (for all parts of question 6). To help understand these answers, consider
the act of stuffing rigid circular regions of a plane into a sphere. If the circular
discs are really two-dimensional, they have no thickness or volume.
Therefore, in theory, you could fit an infinite number of these circles into a
sphere—provided that the sphere's radius is slightly bigger than the circle's
radius. If the sphere's radius were smaller, even one circle could not fit within
the enclosed volume since it would poke out of the volume. Therefore, in
answer to question 1, the volume of a whale cow/preside comfortably in a 24-D
sphere with a radius of 2 inches. In fact, an infinite number of whale volumes
could fit in a 24-D sphere. Likewise, in answer to question 2, a 1000-D sphere
with a radius of 2 inches could contain a volume equivalent to that of a whale.
However, you could not physically stuff a whale into either of these spheres
because the whale has a minimum length that will not permit it to fit. (Con-
Figure 4.23
A whale waiting to be stuffed into a 24-D sphere.