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Speculations on the Fourth Dimension: Selected Writings of Charles .H. Hinton

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Charles Hinton, a mathematician of the late nineteenth century, may well have been one of the few people, or perhaps the only person, to be able to think 'spatially' in four dimensions; he naturally had a difficult time trying to explain what his perceptions were, in much the same way that Flatlanders, when swept up above the plane of their existence into a strange new 'third' dimension, would have a problem explaining to those back on the two-dimension plane where exactly this 'place' or 'direction' was.

Edited by modern mathematician Rudy Rucker (whose brilliant book 'Infinity and the Mind' goes into another rarely-charted territory of speculative and interesting mathematics), this book contains several fascinating essays by Hinton on the development of ideas of multi-dimensionality that predate and anticipate much of twentieth century physics, both real and science fiction. One of the more unusual aspects of this is that Hinton arrived at his theories and calculations without any empirical or experimental data -- this is theoretical and speculative mathematics approaching its most pure form.

In one of Hinton's later essays, 'The Recognition of the Fourth Dimension', printed in the Bulletin of the Philosophical Society of Washington in 1902, Hinton observes that this search for the physical reality of the fourth dimension can take place in two realms -- the very large and the very small; in other words, in the realms of cosmological astronomy and subatomic physics. This is an enormous leap of scientific intuition. However, Hinton describes the difficulty of 'locating' the fourth dimension -- it isn't anywhere one can point, but is rather part of all things at all times, and Hinton talks in terms of curvature (perhaps anticipating the idea of curved and warped spacetime), but not in the sense of a physical three-dimension curve.

One of the more fascinating ideas arising from a reading of these texts is that in trying to express the sense of a fourth dimension to typical three-dimensional readers (as it were), they are yet again reduced to a two-dimensional representation due to the necessary limitations of words and graphics on paper. Drawing three-dimensional images on paper in two dimensions is difficult enough; to attempt to graphically represent yet another dimension creates a host of problems never quite overcome.

Two of the essays here, 'A Plane World' and 'An Episode of Flatland', both continue in that mythical two-dimensional land created by E.A. Abbott. These are fascinating glimpses of the creative way in which Hinton's mind worked, incorporating the mathematical and physical sciences with storylines and philosophy.

A fascinating text!

In life's pursuit of knowledge, in the race for understanding our place in time and space, we have but a finite amount of time during which we observe a mere portal of the vastness of which are a part! This book exercizes the mind in new ways. I recommend it to anyone with interest in Philosphy, Mathematics, Epistemology, Technology, Business, or even LIFE!

vik.