Surfing Through Hyperspace and over 360,000 other books are available for Amazon Kindle – Amazon’s new wireless reading device. Learn more

 

or
Sign in to turn on 1-Click ordering.
 
 
Express Checkout with PayPhrase
What's this? | Create PayPhrase
Sorry!
More Buying Choices
46 used & new from $1.99

Have one to sell? Sell yours here
 
   
Surfing Through Hyperspace: Understanding Higher Universes in Six Easy Lessons
 
 
Start reading Surfing Through Hyperspace on your Kindle in under a minute.

Don’t have a Kindle? Get your Kindle here.
 
  

Surfing Through Hyperspace: Understanding Higher Universes in Six Easy Lessons (Paperback)

~ (Author) "You have returned from Cherbourg and are relaxing in your office at the Washington Metropolitan Field Office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation located on..." (more)
Key Phrases: banchoff klein bottle, fourth spatial dimension, higher universes, White House, Brian Mansfield, Santa Claus (more...)
4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (24 customer reviews)

List Price: $34.99
Price: $26.43 & this item ships for FREE with Super Saver Shipping. Details
You Save: $8.56 (24%)
o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o
In Stock.
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com. Gift-wrap available.

Want it delivered Thursday, November 12? Choose One-Day Shipping at checkout. Details
23 new from $5.59 22 used from $1.99 1 collectible from $21.50

Formats

Amazon Price New from Used from
  Kindle Edition $18.15 -- --
  Hardcover $55.00 $3.41 $0.35
  Paperback $26.43 $5.59 $1.99

Frequently Bought Together

Customers buy this book with The Mobius Strip: Dr. August Mobius's Marvelous Band in Mathematics, Games, Literature, Art, Technology, and Cosmology by Clifford A. Pickover

Surfing Through Hyperspace: Understanding Higher Universes in Six Easy Lessons + The Mobius Strip: Dr. August Mobius's Marvelous Band in Mathematics, Games, Literature, Art, Technology, and Cosmology

Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought

Time: A Traveler's Guide

Time: A Traveler's Guide

by Clifford A. Pickover
4.5 out of 5 stars (20)  $18.24
A Beginner's Guide to Immortality: Extraordinary People, Alien Brains, and Quantum Resurrection

A Beginner's Guide to Immortality: Extraordinary People, Alien Brains, and Quantum Resurrection

by Clifford A. Pickover
4.9 out of 5 stars (8)  $14.35
The Paradox of God and the Science of Omniscience

The Paradox of God and the Science of Omniscience

by Clifford A. Pickover
4.0 out of 5 stars (17)  $16.20
The Mathematics of Oz: Mental Gymnastics from Beyond the Edge

The Mathematics of Oz: Mental Gymnastics from Beyond the Edge

by Clifford A. Pickover
4.8 out of 5 stars (5)  $12.91
Strange Brains and Genius: The Secret Lives Of Eccentric Scientists And Madmen

Strange Brains and Genius: The Secret Lives Of Eccentric Scientists And Madmen

by Clifford A. Pickover
4.0 out of 5 stars (37)  $11.55
Explore similar items

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Clifford Pickover is IBM's Renaissance-guy-in-residence. His job is to play with cool ideas--time travel (Time: A Traveler's Guide), extraterrestrials (The Science of Aliens), and the line between genius and crackpot (Strange Brains and Genius). His latest game is an oldie but goodie: trying to imagine the fourth dimension.

Like a number of his other books, Surfing is structured as a fiction, in this case an X-Files romance--Pickover clearly has a deep and personal appreciation for Scully (whom he calls "Sally," presumably on advice of counsel). You, dear reader, are the FBI's chief investigator of four-dimensional phenomena. As you and your cohorts chase bizarre manifestations from "upsilon" (4-D up) and "delta" (4-D down), Pickover provides explanations, paradoxes, and problems, with many helpful drawings and computer-generated illustrations.

Pickover's book, like every work on higher dimensions, is something of a sequel to Edwin Abbott's classic story, Flatland. Like Abbott, Pickover doesn't just look at the mathematics: "I want to know if humankind's Gods could exist in the fourth dimension." Not for the theologically squeamish, this book is lively, provocative, outrageous, and fascinating. --Mary Ellen Curtin --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.



From Publishers Weekly

Hyperbeings have kidnapped the president! Prolific Discover magazine columnist Pickover (Time: A Traveler's Guide, etc.) alternates expositions of math, physics and geometry with episodes of instructional science fiction while showing interested amateurs the mathematical and physical properties of higher spatial dimensions. Familiar analogies from Edwin Abbott's classic Flatland link up with odder ones from Baha'i and Christian scripture, The X-Files and the superstring theories of modern cosmologists, as Pickover explains how to trap a 4-D organism or why one twirl through a fourth dimension could turn you into your mirror image. Pickover's usual whimsy is in full force here, as he focuses on what four-dimensional organisms could (or do) look like to us: 4-D lifeforms, he explains, could make any 3-D object vanish (or reappear) by lifting it out of (or dropping it back into) our 3-D space. And 4-D creatures with anatomies analogous to ours would probably look, from our limited perspective, like sets of floating, unconnected flesh blobs. In the book's science fictional sections, "you" (a Mulder-esque FBI agent) team up with a skeptic named Sally to investigate mysterious hyperbeings. These second-person adventures seem aimed at young readers, though they don't get in the way of the more sophisticated ideas. Several substantial appendices describe puzzles and games related to hyperspace, while others explain related topics (like the mathematical entities called quaternions) or suggest further reading. Line drawings throughout. (Oct.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

  • Paperback: 272 pages
  • Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (May 17, 2001)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0195142411
  • ISBN-13: 978-0195142419
  • Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 0.7 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 15 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.com Sales Rank: #818,791 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

More About the Author

Clifford A. Pickover
Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Visit Amazon's Clifford A. Pickover Page

Inside This Book (learn more)





Tags Customers Associate with This Product

 (What's this?)
Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
 

Your tags: Add your first tag
 

 

Customer Reviews

24 Reviews
5 star:
 (13)
4 star:
 (7)
3 star:
 (1)
2 star:    (0)
1 star:
 (3)
 
 
 
 
 
Average Customer Review
4.1 out of 5 stars (24 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
Share your thoughts with other customers:
Most Helpful Customer Reviews

 
17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars A Four-Dimensional World for Imaginative Minds, September 11, 2001
By Tatsuo Tabata "tttabata" (Sakai, Osaka Japan) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
The four-dimensional world treated in this book is not the space-time of the theory of relativity, but the world with a fourth spatial direction different from all the directions of our normal three-dimensional space. A number of books on the fourth dimension had already been published. So, why did Pickover, an IBM researcher who published many popular books, write this book? He gives an answer in the preface: The main purpose of the book is to tell the reader the physical appearance of four-dimensional beings, what they can do in our world, and the religious implications of their penetration into our world, with a few simple formulas and computer programs to aid the understanding of the four- and more-dimensional spaces (those who are not interested in computing can easily skip them).

The author presents an SF story, in which an FBI agent, "you," gives personal lectures on hyperspace to his younger fellow agent Sally. Finally they both experience surfing into a four-dimensional world. Meanwhile the reader learns concepts and terms such as "hyperspheres," "tesseracts," "enantiomorphic," "extrinsic geometry," "quaternions," "nonorientable surfaces," etc. The author succeeds in achieving his aim rather well by the use of many illustrations and computer graphics, though he cites too much from Edwin Abbott's "Flatland" in early chapters and from Karl Heim's "Christian Faith and Natural Science" in later chapters.

The book has nine Appendixes (one is a list of SF stories and novels about the fourth dimension), "Notes" and "Further Readings" sections, and Addendum about recent publications dealing with parallel universes and cosmic topology. These are also interesting and informative. This is a good book especially for theologians, philosophers, artists, and general readers who like wild imaginations or computer experiments. To the serious reader who wants to know the implications of hyperspace in modern physics, I would like to recommend Michio Kaku's "Hyperspace."

Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)



 
18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars A profound disappointment in six easy lessons!, June 15, 2005
By Paul Weiss (Dundas, Ontario Canada) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   
Queen Victoria almost certainly would have been amused if she had thought to pick up a copy of Edwin Abbott's inventive story "Flatland" when it was first published in 1884. But it's unlikely that she would be amused at the degree to which Pickover has chosen to rehash all of the same ideas - and, not just once, but seeking to dress the same material up as different chapters over and over again. My goodness, there are only so many ways that one can say a three dimensional sphere projects as a circle in two dimensions. Therefore, a four dimensional hypershpere projects into three dimensions as a sphere. OK, OK - I got it the first time!

It's bad enough that Surfing Through Hyperspace barely rises above plagiarism. But Pickover has tried to tart the presentation up with a bizarre, pretentious narration that is also a simple rip off from Scully and Mulder of X-Files fame! This silly repetitious presentation borders on insulting to any intelligent reader who, after reading a couple or three chapters, will realize they would have been better off going to the store to buy the original item - Flatland.

Any other material that is beyond Flatland - wormholes, Many Worlds Theory, quantum mechanics and superluminal contact, to name a few examples - are explained more completely and more clearly in any number of other sources. I did briefly get excited when one chapter headed down a road that looked really promising - multidimensional variations on games like chess and monopoly; knights that weren't allowed to effectively jump into the 3rd dimension by leaping over men on the board; 3-D chess play inside an 8x8 cube; a chess board on a Möbius strip. Then Pickover pulled the ultimate cop out - "We leave exploration of these interesting variations as an exercise to the reader." For crying out loud, if I was a mathematician, a physicist or a game theorist, somehow I doubt I would have purchased the book in the first place!

Surfing Through Hyperspace promised a deeper understanding of higher dimensions but, for me, it was a profound disappointment.
Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)



 
13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Surfing Through Hyperspace is thought at it's peak., October 1, 1999
By A Customer
Most people are not ready or willing to accept the idea of a fourth dimension, but, Pickover seems to actually live there a few months out of the year. He steps back into our realm only long enough to create another volume to help the rest of us understand the higher universes he's been traversing. Hyperspace is very thoughtfully researched and written with such talent the world has not seen before and may not see again. It contains just the right amount of imagination without being too speculative. Just enough science without being bogged down with math, and a story to help you understand where he wants to go without resorting to "technobabble". All of the visual ideas are accompanied by simple, easy to digest illustrations. I seriosly recommend this and any other Pickover books that enter your range of interest. I promise you will not be wasting your time or money and you will come away from your experience wiser and able to see the world in a wonderful new way.
Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)


Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
 
 
Ad
 
Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars What would four dimensional beings look like?
Great science is about answering interesting questions and great science writing is about making those selfsame answers accessible to the public. Read more
Published on April 9, 2007 by Steve Reina

5.0 out of 5 stars "If Satan Were To Fall From Upsilon To Delta Through Our 3-D Space, What Might We See?"
'Surfing Through Hyperspace' by Clifford Pickover is an engaging presentation of highly theoretical concepts within the field of physics presented in the form of a cosmic... Read more
Published on May 25, 2006 by Brian E. Erland

5.0 out of 5 stars This is a valuable tool!
This is the third of Clifford pickover's books that I've read. Sex Drugs Einstein and Elves is a good introduction to who Pickover is and to some of the subjects he writes about... Read more
Published on April 26, 2006 by Aaron Smith

5.0 out of 5 stars Higher Dimensions Around and In Us
Clifford A. Pickover, "Surfing through Hyperspace," 239 pages, numerous illustrations

This book discusses higher-dimensional geometry, the fourth dimension,... Read more
Published on November 25, 2005 by Ross Ellis

4.0 out of 5 stars good reading for the curious
"Surfing through hyperspace" is a book for those who are curious but not serious about their scientific knowledge. Read more
Published on May 25, 2005 by Linda L. Pahia

4.0 out of 5 stars Wonders of Hyperspace
This is an introduction to the understanding of fourth dimension. Most books, science-TV shows, and websites introduce fourth dimension by comparing the interaction of the three... Read more
Published on January 28, 2004 by Rama Rao

1.0 out of 5 stars YUCK
A quite pathetic rehash of worn out diagrams and dogma. Also very poor paper used.
Published on September 3, 2001 by Michael L. Lewis

4.0 out of 5 stars How to Dumb-Down Multidimensional Mathematics
For my fellow potato-heads: Good book. Pickover is obviously a very smart man (has website with riduculous-smarty-pants stuff on it) who has a knack for making difficult topics... Read more
Published on March 15, 2001 by Jeffrey N. Takle

4.0 out of 5 stars An episodic investigation into dimensions greater than three
Of all the ideas that humans have developed, one of the most difficult is that of dimensions greater than three. Read more
Published on November 19, 2000 by Charles Ashbacher

3.0 out of 5 stars Math Lite
In his latest book, Pickover treats his readers to a lightweight tour of hyperspace. Most of the book is taken up by fiction, speculation, and digression, which doesn't leave much... Read more
Published on September 23, 2000 by Michael Gunther

Only search this product's reviews



Customer Discussions

This product's forum
Discussion Replies Latest Post
No discussions yet

Ask questions, Share opinions, Gain insight
Start a new discussion
Topic:
First post:
Prompts for sign-in
 


Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
Search all Amazon discussions
   




Product Information from the Amapedia Community

Beta (What's this?)


Look for Similar Items by Category


Look for Similar Items by Subject

 

Feedback

If you need help or have a question for Customer Service, contact us.
 Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
Is there any other feedback you would like to provide?

Your comments can help make our site better for everyone.


Your Recent History

 (What's this?)

After viewing product detail pages or search results, look here to find an easy way to navigate back to pages you are interested in.