The Avengers: Loki's Tesseract

 Chitauri's Portal and the Fourth Dimension.

Aside from all the mind-blowing action and witty humor that truly made it a must-watch and a record-breaking movie, The Avengers shared us some knowledge--and some truth--about the Tesseract (originally Cosmic Cube in the Marvel comics Captain America but later called Tesseract in the movie), the cosmic concept that has raised endless debates dating as far back as Aristotle's time and has covered a wide range of theories from Euclid's Geometry Axioms to Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity to the Superstring Theory. Although it doesn't really exist as a tangible object, much less as a dangerous instrument that could wipe out the entire planet, the tesseract may, in simplest terms be conceived as a cube as correctly portrayed in the movie.

From what I've researched the Tesseract, also called the hypercube is a "guided demonstration" of how we perceive in the fourth dimension. Living in the world of three-dimensional perception, this notion should be impossible to simply be drawn as a smaller cube inside a bigger cube, as it is best described in conceivable form. Mathematicians for years have debated about its existence, others claiming that as point is the first dimension, a line/square is the second dimension and a cube is the third dimension, time is the fourth dimension (initially proposed by writer H. G. Wells and supported by Albert Einstein's theory). While others scientifically relate its existence as the world of the paranormal phenomena--ghosts, after-life dimension, dreams, religious mysteries, dreams and maybe mythological times as the Tesseract was portrayed in the movie to be a portal--others like Helena Petrovna Blavatsky of the Victorian era, with her magnum opus "The Secret Doctrine" argued the scientific claim and proposed that such notion is not a quest for discovering a higher form of dimension; rather a new characteristic of matter she called "permeability" revealed by clairvoyance.

The fact that the concept of Tesseract used in The Avengers already amused me as the concept itself has marveled me ever since I met Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle In Time, my first and favorite sci-fi book I read as a kid. With Madeleine's background research and interest in the Tesseract infusing it into the 50-year-old Newbery-Award-winning children's book, I was able to initially picture it as the time machine, giving me a lifetime opportunity to travel to different worlds and dimensions with Meg, Calvin and my favorite Charles Wallace. Even then, L'Engle was able to simplify the idea with Tesseract being like "folding space" into higher dimensions where “a straight line is not the shortest distance between two points.”