hurled into the fourth dimension, we would find that common sense becomes useless. As we drift through the fourth dimension, blobs appear from nowhere in front of our eyes. They constantly change in color, size, and composition, defying all the rules of logic of our three-dimensional world. And they disappear into thin air, to be replaced by other hovering blobs.
If we were invited to a dinner party in the fourth dimension, how would we tell the creatures apart? We would have to recognize them bythe differences in how these blobs change. Each person in higher dimensions would have his or her own characteristic sequences of changing blobs. Over a period of time, we would learn to tell these creatures apart by recognizing their distinctive patterns of changing blobs and colors. Attending dinner parties in hyperspace might be a trying experience.
Class Struggle in the Fourth Dimension
The concept of the fourth dimension had so pervasively infected the intellectual climate by the late nineteenth century that even playwrights poked fun at it. In 1891, Oscar Wilde wrote a spoof on these ghost stories, “The Canterville Ghost,” which lampoons the exploits of a certain gullible “Psychical Society” (a thinly veiled reference to Crookes’s Society for Psychical Research). Wilde wrote of a long-suffering ghost who encounters the newly arrived American tenants of Canterville. Wilde wrote, “There was evidently no time to be lost, so hastily adopting the Fourth Dimension of Space as a means of escape, he [the ghost] vanished through the wainscoting and the house became quiet.”
A more serious contribution to the literature of the fourth dimension was the work of H. G. Wells. Although he is principally remembered for his works in science fiction, he was a dominant figure in the intellectual life of London society, noted for his literary criticism, reviews, and piercing wit. In his 1894 novel,
The Time Machine
, he combined several mathematical, philosophical, and political themes. He popularized a new idea in science—that the fourth dimension might also be viewed as time, not necessarily space: *
Clearly … any real body must have extension in
four
directions: it must have Length, Breadth, Thickness, and—Duration. But through a natural infirmity of the flesh … we incline to overlook this fact. There are really four dimensions, three which we call the three lanes of Space, and a Fourth, Time. There is, however, a tendency to draw an unreal distinction between the former three dimensions and the latter, because it happens that our consciousness moves intermittently in one direction along the latter from the beginning to the end of our lives. 3
Like
Flatland
before it, what makes
The Time Machine
so enduring, even a century after its conception, is its sharp political and social critique. England in the year 802,701, Wells’s protagonist finds, is not the gleaming citadel of modern scientific marvels that the positivists foretold. Instead, the future England is a land where the class struggle went awry. The working class was cruelly forced to live underground, until the workers mutated into a new, brutish species of human, the Morlocks, while the ruling class, with its unbridled debauchery, deteriorated and evolved into the useless race of elflike creatures, the Eloi.
Wells, a prominent Fabian socialist, was using the fourth dimension to reveal the ultimate irony of the class struggle. The social contract between the poor and the rich had gone completely mad. The useless Eloi are fed and clothed by the hard-working Morlocks, but the workers get the final revenge: The Morlocks eat the Eloi. The fourth dimension, in other words, became a foil for a Marxist critique of modern society, but with a novel twist: The working class will not break the chains of the rich, as Marx predicted. They will eat the rich.
In a short story, “The Plattner Story,” Wells even toyed with the paradox of handedness. Gottfried Plattner, a
If we were invited to a dinner party in the fourth dimension, how would we tell the creatures apart? We would have to recognize them bythe differences in how these blobs change. Each person in higher dimensions would have his or her own characteristic sequences of changing blobs. Over a period of time, we would learn to tell these creatures apart by recognizing their distinctive patterns of changing blobs and colors. Attending dinner parties in hyperspace might be a trying experience.
Class Struggle in the Fourth Dimension
The concept of the fourth dimension had so pervasively infected the intellectual climate by the late nineteenth century that even playwrights poked fun at it. In 1891, Oscar Wilde wrote a spoof on these ghost stories, “The Canterville Ghost,” which lampoons the exploits of a certain gullible “Psychical Society” (a thinly veiled reference to Crookes’s Society for Psychical Research). Wilde wrote of a long-suffering ghost who encounters the newly arrived American tenants of Canterville. Wilde wrote, “There was evidently no time to be lost, so hastily adopting the Fourth Dimension of Space as a means of escape, he [the ghost] vanished through the wainscoting and the house became quiet.”
A more serious contribution to the literature of the fourth dimension was the work of H. G. Wells. Although he is principally remembered for his works in science fiction, he was a dominant figure in the intellectual life of London society, noted for his literary criticism, reviews, and piercing wit. In his 1894 novel,
The Time Machine
, he combined several mathematical, philosophical, and political themes. He popularized a new idea in science—that the fourth dimension might also be viewed as time, not necessarily space: *
Clearly … any real body must have extension in
four
directions: it must have Length, Breadth, Thickness, and—Duration. But through a natural infirmity of the flesh … we incline to overlook this fact. There are really four dimensions, three which we call the three lanes of Space, and a Fourth, Time. There is, however, a tendency to draw an unreal distinction between the former three dimensions and the latter, because it happens that our consciousness moves intermittently in one direction along the latter from the beginning to the end of our lives. 3
Like
Flatland
before it, what makes
The Time Machine
so enduring, even a century after its conception, is its sharp political and social critique. England in the year 802,701, Wells’s protagonist finds, is not the gleaming citadel of modern scientific marvels that the positivists foretold. Instead, the future England is a land where the class struggle went awry. The working class was cruelly forced to live underground, until the workers mutated into a new, brutish species of human, the Morlocks, while the ruling class, with its unbridled debauchery, deteriorated and evolved into the useless race of elflike creatures, the Eloi.
Wells, a prominent Fabian socialist, was using the fourth dimension to reveal the ultimate irony of the class struggle. The social contract between the poor and the rich had gone completely mad. The useless Eloi are fed and clothed by the hard-working Morlocks, but the workers get the final revenge: The Morlocks eat the Eloi. The fourth dimension, in other words, became a foil for a Marxist critique of modern society, but with a novel twist: The working class will not break the chains of the rich, as Marx predicted. They will eat the rich.
In a short story, “The Plattner Story,” Wells even toyed with the paradox of handedness. Gottfried Plattner, a
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