Behind the Cover: April 2022
Each month, Physics Today editors explore the research and design choices that inspired the latest cover of the magazine.
Physics Today‘s April issue has a variety of important and visually compelling stories, from the latest search for magnetic monopoles to the growing issue of satellite light pollution . But the sleek and bold tesseract proved the most compelling cover.
This three-dimensional projection shows a tesseract rotating about two orthogonal planes in 4D space.
A tesseract, also known as a four-dimensional hypercube, is the 4D analogue of the 3D cube, much as the cube is the 3D analogue of the 2D square. The framed structure on the cover is one way to represent the 4D object in our 3D world, although others exist, as shown in this video. In this month’s issue, Hannah Price discusses experimental tricks to likewise mimic 4D space in the lab. Those techniques work for ultracold atoms, photonics, acoustics, and electric circuits, among other systems, and they aim to unearth higher-dimensional topological physics.
Art director Donna Padian, who designed the April cover, emphasized the 4D hypercube by placing the cover line at its center. The text adds an extra visual dimension to the 3D representation, and the different text weights allow the cover line to fit neatly in the tesseract. The typeface she selected was Acumin Pro Condensed and Heavy. Robert Slimbach, a principal type designer at Adobe Inc, where he has worked since 1987, designed the sans serif fonts as part of a typographic tradition known as neo-grotesque, which includes Arial, Helvetica, and other common fonts.
Padian’s choice of bold and differing colors for the cover line helps it pop and accentuates the tesseract’s ominous environs, which hint at the mystery of higher-dimensional physics. She also mimicked the hypercube’s light and shadow in the type to give everything an added depth.