Scientific Romances (First Series)Hinton, Charles Howard
Philosophy
Scientific Romances (First Series)
Hinton, Charles Howard
Fourth dimension
It will be observed that the surface of the sphere, although only a 2
thing, involves the conception of 3 space, and cannot be understood
without the use of the idea of 3 space. It is a 2 thing because at any
point of the surface a being can only move in two independent
directions. A crooked line drawn on the surface of a sphere is a 1 thing
in a 2 thing in 3 space.
Another very common misconception is occasioned by the use of a figure
of this kind [Illustration: symbol] to represent a “knot” in 2 space.
It obviously corresponds in 2 space to an iron rod welded together at
the crossing place of the loop, so that it is indistinguishable which is
the one free end, which the other. At the crossing point the two lines
represented by the two ink marks must be absolutely one and the same.
If one line be supposed to go over the other, by however small a
distance, it would leave the plane. It would suddenly become invisible
to the creature in the plane, and it would appear again at the other
side of the line it crossed as if it came from nowhere.
It would be as extraordinary a sight as if we saw a pole going up to a
brick wall, then beyond the brick wall the rest of the pole
appearing—not going through the brick wall, nor coming round it—but
somehow appearing; part of the same pole moving when it moved, obviously
connected with it, and yet with no joining part which we could possibly
discover.
Again, it sometimes appears to be thought that the fourth dimension is
in some way different from the three which we know. But there is nothing
mysterious at all about it. It is just an ordinary dimension tilted up
in some way, which with our bodily organs we cannot point to. But if it
is bent down it will be just like any ordinary dimension: a line which
went up into the fourth dimension one inch will, when bent down, lie an
inch in any known direction we like to point out. Only if this line in
the fourth dimension be supposed to be connected rigidly with any rigid
body, one of the directions in that rigid body must point away in the
fourth dimension when the line that was in the fourth comes into a 3
space direction.
If the reader will refer back to the paper on the plane world he will
find a description of the means by which a being there might know that
he was in a limited world, and that his conception of space was not of
what was really the whole of space, but of the limited portion of it to
which he was confined by his manner of being.
The test by which such a being could discover his limitation was this.
He found two things, each consisting of a multitude of parts—two
triangles; and the relationship of the parts of the one was the same as
the relationship of the parts of the other. For every point in the one
there was a corresponding point in the other. For every pair of points
in the one there was a corresponding pair of points in the other. In
fact, considered as systems made up of mutually related parts, each was
the same as the other.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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