In 1897, mathematics instructor Charles Hinton designed a gunpowder-powered baseball pitching machine for the Princeton University baseball team's batting practice.

Hinton also wrote a series of books on the aspects of the fourth dimension. In one of his books he described what look more like a set of child's alphabet blocks, actually color coded objects that represent the tesseract, a fourth dimensional cube. He described that a person memorizing the set of 12 cubes, all of their faces and edges and points, can train his mind to perceive a fourth dimensional object. He also claimed a percentage of individuals attempting to do so had become mad.

I built that tesseract model to his exact specifications. Each of the faces and edges and points have their unique color and name. I may be one of the few people on the planet that possesses this particular hand built model as specified by Hinton.

I went so far as to build it many years ago, but I haven't taken the mental effort to memorize all the parts of what look like 12 separate colored cubes. If a person had never seen a cube, a three-dimensional cube, you could describe it as 6 flat squares connected by common edges. You can name the edges and faces and points and ask the person to figure out how they go together. If he's lucky his mind will assemble it in three-dimensional space and he would see it as a cube. Or maybe he would go mad in the process.

I bring this up because it makes it obvious that since there is a fourth dimension, it comprises an entire universe of objects and beings just a millimeter away from everything we know. We just don't have four dimensional eyes to see it. It's like an ant on the sidewalk that cannot see the skyscraper towering above it.

I'm sure when you go smashing atoms together, parts of them probably fly off into unseen dimensions. This would lead the CERN scientists to a more focused inquiry into what may lie in the fourth dimension. And there be dragons.