BibliOdyssey is my favorite blogsource of book illustrations and other ephemera. I stopped short on seeing this illustration from Charles Hinton's 1904 work The Fourth Dimension:
A tesseract, as every reader of Ishbadiddle knows from reading A Wrinkle In Time knows, is a
"Nnow," Mrs. Which said. "Arre wee rreaddy?"
"Where are we going?" Calvin asked.
Again Meg felt an actual physical tingling of fear as Mrs. Which spoke.
"Wwee musstt ago bbehindd thee sshaddow."
"But we will not do it all at once," Mrs. Whatsit comforted them. "We will do it in short stages." She looked at Meg. "Now wewill tesser, we will wrinkle again. Do you understand?"
"No," Meg said flatly.
Mrs. Whatsit sighed. "Explanations are not easy when they are about things for which your civilization still has no words. Calvin talked about traveling at the speed of light. You understand that, little Meg?"
"Yes," Meg nodded.
"That, of course, is the impractical, long way around. We have learned to take short cuts wherever possible."
"Sort of like in math?" Meg asked.
"Like in math." Mrs. Whatsit looked over at Mrs. Who.
"Take your skirt and show them."
"La experiencia es la madre de la ciencia. Spanish, my dears. Cervantes. Experience is the mother of knowledge." Mrs. Who took a portion of her white robe in her hands and held it tight.
"You see," Mrs. Whatsit said, "if a very small insect were to move from the section of skirt in Mrs. Who's right hand to that in her left, it would be quite a long walk for him if he had to walk straight across."
Swiftly Mrs. Who brought her hands, still holding the skirt, together.
"Now, you see," Mrs. Whatsit said, "he would be there, without that long trip. That is how we travel."
(text and images grabbed from here)
Hinton, who invented the word "tesseract," sounds like a good candidate for an exhibit at the Museum of Jurassic Technology. Those colored cubes (not to be confused with Timecube!) are a way to (somehow) visualize four-dimensional space. You can read more in The Fourth Dimension which is now scanned and on-line. In addition to his work as a mathematician and sci-fi author, Hinton was a bigamist and an inventor:
In 1897, he designed a gunpowder-powered baseball pitching machine for the Princeton baseball team's batting practice. According to one source it caused several injuries, and may have been in part responsible for Hinton's dismissal from Princeton that year. However, the machine was versatile, capable of variable speeds with an adjustable breech size, and firing curve balls by the use of two rubber coated steel fingers at the muzzle of the pitcher. He successfully introduced the machine to the University of Minnesota where Hinton worked as an assistant professor until 1900.
As a coincidental side note, Hinton was the son-in-law of George Boole, whose family's history will figure into the VSNP. Also by coincidence, tomorrow is L'Engle's birthday.
| Tesseract | History | VSNP | 19th Century | Baseball | Inventors |
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Comment #1 :: link :: May 12, 2007 01:29 PM
