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Boing Boing

Why a ball in a box vanishes as you add more dimensions

Ellsworth Toohey
Mar 06, 2026
∙ Paid

3Blue1Brown/YouTube

Put a ball in a box. In two dimensions, the ball (a circle) fills most of the box (a square). In three dimensions, a sphere still takes up a good chunk of its cube. But keep adding dimensions, and something weird happens: the ball shrinks to almost nothing inside the box.

Grant Sanderson’s 3Blue1Brown video walks through this thought e…

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