![]() ![]() ![]() (Wandrei's "The Monster from Nowhere" was wrongly cited as a dimensions-related story in past editions of this encyclopedia, almost certainly because the above-mentioned Bond story with the identical title is wrongly credited to Wandrei in the first edition of The Best of Science Fiction edited by Groff Conklin.) In E E "Doc" Smith's Skylark of Valeron (August 1934-February 1935 Astounding 1949) the heroes briefly enter a four-dimensional reality, and in Clifford D Simak's "Hellhounds of the Cosmos" (June 1932 Astounding), 99 men enter the fourth dimension in a single grotesque body to fight a four-dimensional Monster. Algernon Blackwood's "The Pikestaffe Case" (in Tongues of Fire, coll 1924) attempts to evoke the non-Euclidean geometry of a dimensional gateway lurking within a mirror, which has practical uses for its mathematician creator (he stores his books and equipment outside normal 3-D space) but is also a route to initially feared Transcendence.Įarly Genre-SF writers who found the notion of dimensions fascinating included Miles J Breuer, most notably in "The Appendix and the Spectacles" (December 1928 Amazing) and "The Captured Cross-Section" (February 1929 Amazing) Donald Wandrei in "Infinity Zero" (October 1936 Astounding) and Nelson S Bond in "The Monster from Nowhere" (July 1939 Fantastic Adventures), which makes play with the fact that a four-dimensional entity's various limbs or digits could appear as separate solid objects as the creature intersects our 3D world. The eponymous figure of E V Odle's The Clockwork Man ( 1923) could perceive many dimensions when working properly, but while malfunctioning could do no more than flutter back and forth in time, offering the merest hint of the quality of multidimensional life. H G Wells borrowed Hintonian arguments to "explain" the working of the device in The Time Machine ( 1895). In his story "An Unfinished Communication" (in Stella and An Unfinished Communication, coll 1895) the afterlife involves freedom to move along the time dimension (see Time Travel) to relive and reassess moments of life he also wrote a Flatland novel, An Episode of Flatland ( 1907). ![]() The challenge was taken up by C H Hinton, whose many essays on the subject attempt to "explain" ghosts and to imagine a four-dimensional God from whom nothing in the human world can be hidden. The possible dimensional limitations of human existence and perception were dramatized by Edwin A Abbott in Flatland ( 1884) as by "A Square", in which Flatland is a world of two-dimensional beings, one of whom is challenged to imagine our three-dimensional world – encouraging readers, by analogy, to attempt to imagine a four-dimensional world. J W Dunne used the notion to explain prophetic dreams, eventually constructing a theory of the "Serial Universe", and P D Ouspensky (1878-1947) built a more complex model of the Universe in which time "moves" in a spiral and there are six spatial dimensions. Many modern occultists and pseudoscientists have followed in the tracks of Johann Zöllner (1834-1882), author of Transcendental Physics ( 1865), who borrowed mathematical notions to "justify" the idea of the "astral plane" beloved by spiritualists and Theosophists (see Theosophy). The Cosmology of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity (1916), which proposes a four-dimensional model of the Universe in which the notions of space and time are collapsed into a single "spacetime continuum", offered considerable encouragement to sf notions of a multidimensional Universe or Multiverse. The possible existence of Parallel Worlds displaced from ours along a fourth spatial dimension (in the same way that a series of two-dimensional universes might lie next to one another like the pages of a book) is a popular hypothesis in sf, and such worlds are frequently referred to as "other dimensions". Conventional graphical analysis frequently represents Time as a dimension, encouraging consideration of it as the "fourth dimension". We perceive three spatial dimensions, but theoretical Mathematics is easily capable of dealing with many more. ![]()
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