Hyperspace by Michio Kaku, Robert O'Keefe Page A

science teacher, is performing an elaborate chemical experiment, but his experiment blows up and sends him into another universe. When he returns from the netherworld to the real world, he discovers that his body has been altered in a curious fashion: His heart is now on his right side, and he is now left handed. When they examine him, his doctors are stunned to find that Plattner’s entire body has been reversed, a biological impossibility in our three-dimensional world: “[T]he curious inversion of Plattner’s right and left sides is proof that he has moved out of our space into what is called the Fourth Dimension, and that he has returned again to our world.” However, Plattner resists the idea of a postmortem dissection after his death, thereby postponing “perhaps forever, the positive proof that his entire body had had its left and right sides transposed.”
    Wells was well aware that there are two ways to visualize how left-handed objects can be transformed into right-handed objects. A Flat-lander, for example, can be lifted out of his world, flipped over, and then placed back in Flatland, thereby reversing his organs. Or the Flat-lander may live on a Möbius strip, created by twisting a strip of paper 180 degrees and then gluing the ends together. If a Flatlander walks completely around the Möbius strip and returns, he finds that his organs have been reversed ( Figure 3.2 ). Möbius strips have other remarkable properties that have fascinated scientists over the past century. For example, if you walk completely around the surface, you will find that it has only one side. Also, if you cut it in half along the center strip, it remains in one piece. This has given rise to the mathematicians’ limerick:

    Figure 3.2. A Möbius strip is a strip with only one side. Its outside and inside are identical. If a Flatlander wanders around a Möbius strip, his internal organs will be reversed
.
     
A mathematician confided
That a Möbius band is one-sided
And you’ll get quite a laugh
If you cut it in half,
For it stays in one piece when divided.
    In his classic
The Invisible Man
, Wells speculated that a man might even become invisible by some trick involving “a formula, a geometrical expression involving four dimensions.” Wells knew that a Flatlander disappears if he is peeled off his two-dimensional universe; similarly, a man could become invisible if he could somehow leap into the fourth dimension.
    In the short story “The Remarkable Case of Davidson’s Eyes,” Wells explored the idea that a “kink in space” might enable an individual tosee across vast distances. Davidson, the hero of the story, one day finds he has the disturbing power of being able to see events transpiring on a distant South Sea island. This “kink in space” is a space warp whereby light from the South Seas goes through hyperspace and enters his eyes in England. Thus Wells used Riemann’s wormholes as a literary device in his fiction.
    In
The Wonderful Visit
, Wells explored the possibility that heaven exists in a parallel world or dimension. The plot revolves around the predicament of an angel who accidentally falls from heaven and lands in an English country village.
    The popularity of Wells’s work opened up a new genre of fiction. George McDonald, a friend of mathematician Lewis Carroll, also speculated about the possibility of heaven being located in the fourth dimension. In McDonald’s fantasy
Lilith
, written in 1895, the hero creates a dimensional window between our universe and other worlds by manipulating mirror reflections. And in the 1901 story
The Inheritors
by Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford, a race of supermen from the fourth dimension enters into our world. Cruel and unfeeling, these supermen begin to take over the world.
The Fourth Dimension as Art
     
    The years 1890 to 1910 may be considered the Golden Years of the Fourth Dimension. It was a time during which the ideas originated by Gauss and Riemann permeated