system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
What is the difference and/or relation between the 4 dimensions of spacetime and the 4 dimensions involved in the notion of objects like tesseracts (4 dimensional cubes)?

I have a very basic conceptual knowledge of the two ideas but I never really considered them together.

When we talk about tesseracts and their 4 dimensions are we really implying that they have at least 5 dimensions (x, y, z, w, and t)? Any insight or resources would be greatly appreciated.
gpt
a minus sign. 

To be specific, say you want to find the distance between a point and the origin in 3 space dimensions: ds^2 = dx^2 + dy^2 + dz^2 . And you could keep tacking on additional space-like dimensions if you wanted with more plus signs.

But when we deal with time, and we want to know the distance between an "event" (point in space at some time) and the origin (origin of space coordinates and at time=0) then ds^2 = -dt^2 + dx^2 + dy^2 +dz^2 .