Introduction to Speculations on the Fourth Dimension: Selected Writings A/Charles H
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Victorian Network
Victorian Network Volume 7, Number 1 Summer 2016 Victorian Brain © Victorian Network Volume 7, Number 1 Summer 2016 www.victoriannetwork.org Guest Editor Sally Shuttleworth General Editor Sophie Duncan Founding Editor Katharina Boehm Editorial Board Megan Anderluh Sarah Crofton Rosalyn Gregory Tammy Ho Lai-Ming Sarah Hook Alison Moulds Heidi Weig Victorian Network is funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council and supported by King’s College London. Victorian Network Volume 7, Number 1 (Summer 2016) TABLE OF CONTENTS GUEST EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION: VICTORIAN BRAIN 1 Sally Shuttleworth ARTICLES Lucid Daydreaming: Experience and Pathology in Charlotte Brontë 12 Timothy Gao Two Brains and a Tree: Defining the Material Bases 36 for Delusion and Reality in the Woodlanders Anna West ‘The Apotheosis of Voice’: Mesmerism as Mechanisation 61 in George Du Maurier’s Trilby Kristie A. Schlauraff Female Transcendence: Charles Howard Hinton 83 and Hyperspace Fiction Patricia Beesley The Hand and the Mind, the Man and the Monster 107 Kimberly Cox BOOK REVIEWS A Cultural History of the Senses in the Age of Empire, 137 Vol. 5, ed. Constance Classen (Bloomsbury, 2014) Ian Middlebrook Popular Fiction and Brain Science in the Late Nineteenth Century, 142 by Anne Stiles (Cambridge, 2011) Arden Hegele Thomas Hardy’s Brains: Psychology, Neurology, and Hardy’s Imagination, 148 by Suzanne Keen (Ohio State, 2014) Nicole Lobdell Victorian Network Volume 7, Number 1 (Summer 2016) The Poet’s Mind: The Psychology of Victorian Poetry 1830-1870, 153 by Gregory Tate (Oxford, 2012) Benjamin Westwood Theatre and Evolution from Ibsen to Beckett, 158 by Kirsten Shepherd-Barr (Columbia, 2015) Katharina Herold Victorian Network Volume 7, Number 1 (Summer 2016) Sally Shuttleworth 1 VICTORIAN BRAIN SALLY SHUTTLEWORTH, PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH (UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD) In April 1878 the first issue of Brain: A Journal of Neurology was published. -
The Cubes of Hinton
THE CUBES OF HINTON Taneli Luotoniemi matharts.aalto.fi WIKIPEDIA SOURCES: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-dimensional_space https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesseract https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Howard_Hinton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alicia_Boole_Stott HYPERSPACE PHILOSOPHER British mathematician Charles Howard Hinton, played a key part in the popularization of ‘hyperphilosophy’ by publishing many writings during the years 1884–1907, speculating on the physical as well as spiritual aspects of 4–space. He also anticipated the hidden dimensions of string theory by stating that the fourth dimension could perhaps be observed on the smallest details of physical matter. Hinton coined the names ana and kata, which refer to the positive and negative directions along the axis of the fourth spatial dimension. Charles Howard Hinton, (1853–1907) HYPERSPACE PHILOSOPHER Hinton developed a mnemonic system of some tens of thousand cubes with individual names in Latin, serving as a 3-dimensional mental retina of a kind on which to visualize the successive cross-sections of objects in 4-space. Interested in Eastern thought, he also sought to eliminate the ‘self elements’ of his system by memorizing the different orientations and mirror reflections of the cubes. Later he developed the system into a self- help method to visualize the fourth dimension, which consisted of manipulation of coloured cubes. The cubes were available Charles Howard Hinton, (1853–1907) for purchase from his publisher. Frontispiece of The Fourth Dimension (1901) ALICIA BOOLE STOTT Hinton was a frequent guest at the household of Mary Everest Boole, whose husband George was famous of his Boolean algebra. -
1 Introduction
Notes 1 Introduction 1. H. G. Wells, Interview with the Weekly Sun Literary Supplement, 1 December 1895; reprinted in ‘A Chat with the Author of The Time Machine, Mr H. G. Wells’, edited with comment by David C. Smith, The Wellsian, n.s. 20 (1997), 3–9 (p. 8). 2. Wells himself labelled his early scientific fantasies as ‘scientific romances’ when he published a collection with Victor Gollancz entitled The Scientific Romances of H. G. Wells in 1933, thus ensuring the adoption of the term in subsequent critical discussions of his work. The term appears to have origi- nated with the publication of Charles Howard Hinton’s Scientific Romances (1886), a collection of speculative scientific essays and short stories. 3. It should be noted, however, that Wells’s controversial second scientific romance, The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), did not appear in a serialised form. However, The Invisible Man was published in Pearson’s Weekly in June and July 1897, When the Sleeper Wakes was published in The Graphic between January and May 1899, The First Men in the Moon was published in the Strand Magazine between December 1900 and August 1901 and A Modern Utopia was serialised in the Fortnightly Review between October 1904 and April 1905. 4. A number of Wells’s most significant scientific essays have been available for some time in an anthology, H. G. Wells: Early Writings in Science and Science Fiction, ed. by Robert M. Philmus and David Y. Hughes (London: University of California Press, 1975). 5. ‘A Chat with the Author of The Time Machine’, p. -
Professor at Cork [Edit]
1997George Boole School Mathematical foundations ofcomputer science Main interests Mathematics, Logic,Philosophy of mathematics Notable ideas Boolean algebra Influenced by[show] Influenced[show] dedicated to George Boole. Plaque beneath Boole's window in Lincoln Cathedral. Professor at Cork [edit] Boole's status as mathematician was recognised by his appointment in 1849 as the first professor of mathematics at Queen's College, Cork inIreland. He met his future wife, Mary Everest, there in 1850 while she was visiting her uncle John Ryall who was Professor of Greek. They married some years later.[11] He maintained his ties with Lincoln, working there with E. R. Larken in a campaign to reduce prostitution.[12] The house in Cork in which Boole lived between 1849 and 1855. Boole was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1857;[7] and received honorary degrees ofLL.D. from the University of Dublin and Oxford University. Death [edit] On 8 December 1864, Boole died of an attack of fever, ending in pleural effusion. He was buried in the Church of Ireland cemetery of St Michael's, Church Road, Blackrock (a suburb of Cork City). There is a commemorative plaque inside the adjoining church. Boole's gravestone, Cork, Ireland. Works [edit] Boole's first published paper was Researches in the theory of analytical transformations, with a special application to the reduction of the general equation of the second order, printed in the Cambridge Mathematical Journal in February 1840 (Volume 2, no. 8, pp. 64–73), and it led to a friendship between Boole and Duncan Farquharson Gregory, the editor of the journal. -
Mad' Scientists, Realism, and the Supernatural in Late Victorian Popular Fiction
TESTING REALITY’S LIMITS: ‘MAD’ SCIENTISTS, REALISM, AND THE SUPERNATURAL IN LATE VICTORIAN POPULAR FICTION A dissertation presented by Jennifer Sopchockchai Bankard to The Department of English In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the field of English Northeastern University Boston, Massachusetts March 2013 1 TESTING REALITY’S LIMITS: ‘MAD’ SCIENTISTS, REALISM, AND THE SUPERNATURAL IN LATE VICTORIAN POPULAR FICTION by Jennifer Sopchockchai Bankard ABSTRACT OF DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the Graduate School of Social Sciences and Humanities of Northeastern University March 2013 2 ABSTRACT In the late Victorian period, approaching the fin de siècle, popular fiction frequently featured what critics would now call mad scientists. These mad scientist characters served as a vehicle for Victorian authors to explore the epistemological relationship between humans and the material world, often highlighting the shortcomings of the human eye or subjective perception of reality. By tracing the scientific and supernatural discourses surrounding representations of scientists featured in works by H.G. Wells, Bram Stoker, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Arthur Conan Doyle, this revisionist literary history demonstrates that Victorian popular fiction and “classic realist” novels share a common interest in human perceptions and representations of a material reality. Arguing that the genre categories traditionally applied to these texts are permeable and unstable, Testing Reality’s Limits continues work begun by scholars, such as George Levine, who redefined Victorian realism as a self-conscious experiment rather than a naively mimetic practice, and addresses literature not yet studied by such scholars. -
De Freitas, Elizabeth (2017) Digital Mazes and Spatial Reasoning: Using Colour and Movement to Explore the 4Th Dimension
de Freitas, Elizabeth (2017) Digital Mazes and Spatial Reasoning: Using Colour and Movement to Explore the 4th Dimension. In: Innovation and technology enhancement in mathematics education. Mathematics Education in the Digital Era . Springer Verlag, pp. 237-257. ISBN 978-3-319-61488-5 Downloaded from: https://e-space.mmu.ac.uk/621687/ Publisher: Springer Verlag DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61488-5 Please cite the published version https://e-space.mmu.ac.uk De Freitas, E. (2017). The new materialism of Charles Hinton: Spatial reasoning in 4D digital mazes. In Faggiano, E., Ferrera, F. & Montone, A. (Eds)..Innovation and technology Enhancing mathematics education. Springer Verlag. The new materialism of Charles Hinton: Spatial reasoning in 4D digital mazes De Freitas, E. (2017). The new materialism of Charles Hinton: Spatial reasoning in 4D digital mazes. In Faggiano, E., Ferrera, F. & Montone, A. (Eds)..Innovation and technology Enhancing mathematics education. Springer Verlag. Elizabeth de Freitas [email protected] Education and Social Research Institute Manchester Metropolitan University Abstract This chapter focuses on innovative developments of four-dimensional digital mazes, examining how these mazes tap into the ideas of mathematician and fiction writer Charles Hinton (1853-1907) who wrote extensively on perception of a 4th geometric dimension. Hinton treats mathematical objects as physical and material movements, and draws on non-Euclidean geometry to argue for a virtual dimension to matter. I discuss recent attempts to build digital mazes that develop spatial sense in four dimensions, and show how these are directly linked to Hinton’s ideas. I focus on how colour and movement in digital environments are used to develop a distinctive kind of spatial sense. -
Roger Luckhurst
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE SCIENTIFIC ROMANCE, FANTASY AND THE SUPERNATURAL Roger Luckhurst ecognisable modern popular fi ction genres began to emerge in the latter half Rof the nineteenth century, with the extension of mass culture driven by a transformation in the economic and technological basis for print journals. This was the literature for what George Gissing dismissively called the ‘quarter educated’ in New Grub Street (Gissing 1998, p. 460). Conservative commentators dismissed the fi ction fi lling the new journals as quick and formulaic, a crude stimulus for blunted nerves already over-stretched by urban modernity. This was not culture, but anarchy. Fin-de-siècle Decadence has often been critically regarded as a defensive formation against this mass culture. High art hoped to raise itself above the lowly market, and however hopeless and contradictory this aim, literary criticism has tended to follow. Henry James was understood to have won the aesthetic argument with H. G. Wells over the nature of fi ction; it was Wells who quitted the fi eld calling his own art ‘abortion’ (Wells in Edel and Ray 1959, p. 176). Yet genre fi ction has its own distinct cultural work to do; one aesthetic standard will not fi t all. Genre may appear formulaic, but formulae, after all, are immensely generative symbolic expressions: concentrations of thought, not signs of its absence. There is something worth exploring about the fl owering of non- or anti-Realist popular genres in the late Victorian period. The ‘scientifi c romance,’ coined in the 1880s, named an innovative fusion of ancient form with modern content (the awkward term ‘scientifi ction’ appeared in the American pulp magazine market in 1926, coined by editor Hugo Gernsback, before ‘science fi ction’ settled the generic name three years later). -
Other Worlds: Spirituality and the Search for Invisible Dimensions
NONFICTION REVIEWS Other Worlds: Spirituality and the Search for Invisible Dimensions Aga J. Drenda Christopher G. White. Other Worlds: Spirituality and the Search for Invisible Dimensions. Harvard UP, 2018. Hardback. 384 pg. $35.00, ISBN 9780674984295. IN Other Worlds: Spirituality and the Search for Invisible Dimensions, Christopher G. White explores the history and imaginative power of the idea that the universe has higher, invisible dimensions. To accomplish his goal, White assembles an unusual cast of characters: visionary mathematicians, fantasy writers like George MacDonald and C. S. Lewis, mystical physicists, spirit channelers, television producers, hippie scientists, New Age prophets, social reformers, indefatigable parapsychologists, and artists like Max Weber (3). White argues that the diversity of this group is dictated by the desire to make a larger point about science and religion, which are often seen as implacable enemies. He posits that scientific and religious ideas come braided together and influence each other to a degree that has gone unnoticed, and he strives to address it (13). White treats the idea of the invisible dimensions historically and structures his book accordingly. He begins with the mid-nineteenth century mathematical discoveries of the idea of the fourth dimension and moves through the evolution of the idea across various disciplines until the modern day. This historical approach to the subject makes the structure of the book easy to navigate, especially as chapters are also thematically focused on areas of interest. For example, chapter one is focused on Edwin Abbott’s life and career, with special attention paid to Flatland (1884), a text that has become a classic for scholars of science fiction, students of mathematics, and spiritual seekers alike. -
Watchmen and from Hell
ISSN: 2342-2009 Fafnir vol 3, iss 4, pages 23–3924–40 Fafnir – Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research journal.finfar.org Superhuman Cognitions, Fourth Dimension and Speculative Comics Narrative: Panel Repetition in Watchmen and From Hell Oskari Rantala Abstract: This article investigates the use of repeating panels in relation to speculative fiction storytelling in graphic novels Watchmen and From Hell, written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Dave Gibbons and Eddie Campbell, respectively. Presenting the same panel several times over the course of the narrative is an expressive medium-specific narrative technique available only to comics. In the discussed graphic novels, panel repetition is used to represent the superhuman cognitions of the quantum powered superhero Dr. Manhattan, as well as the magical experiences of Sir William Gull, the homicidal madman behind the brutal Jack the Ripper murders in Victorian London. Both characters have abilities and inner life which can be considered speculative, fantastic, or science fictional. Furthermore, their extraordinary cognitions and experiences are exceptionally well- suited to be represented through the comics medium, a narrative form operating on fragmentary visual matter. Comics narrative can employ complex repetitive patterns which Watchmen and From Hell use to simulate four-dimensional simultaneity and detachment of time and space. Moreover, in “The Dance of the Gull-Catchers”, the nonfiction appendix to From Hell that examines the history of ripperology, panel repetition provides narrative evidence, takes part in speculative play, and also works as a device for visualizing the disnarrated. Keywords: Alan Moore, repetition, panel, comics, graphic novel, graphic narrative, speculative fiction Biography and contact info: Oskari Rantala is a PhD student of Literature in the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. -
Taneli Luotoniemi H Y P E R Sp a C Ial Inte R L a C E Ta N E L I L Uo T O N Ie M I
taneli luotoniemi taneli s l ode m crafted H g u o r H t y r t e m o e g nterlace i Hyperspacial l a n o i s n e m i d - r u o f g r a s p i n g luotoniemi taneli s l ode m Crafted h g u o r h t y r t e m o e g l a n o i s n e m i d - r u o f g r a s p i n g taneli luotoniemi taneli Hyperspatial Interlace – Grasping Four-dimensional Geometry Through Crafted Models Taneli Luotoniemi Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture Department of Art SUPERVISING PROFESSORS Juha Varto and Helena Sederholm THESIS ADVISOR Jeffrey Weeks PRELIMINARY EXAMINERS Henry Segerman and Jyrki Siukonen OPPONENTS Thomas Banchoff and Jyrki Siukonen Aalto University publication series DOCTORAL DISSERTATIONS 56 / 2019 Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture Department of Art Aalto ARTS Books Espoo, Finland shop.aalto.fi © Taneli Luotoniemi GRAPHIC DESIGN Kaarina Tammisto MATERIALS Scandia 2000 Natural 130g, Scandia 2000 Natural 300g TYPEFACES Freight Text Pro, Surt ISBN 978-952-60-8479-4 (printed) ISBN 978-952-60- 8480-0 (pdf) ISSN 1799-4934 ISSN 1799-4942 (electronic) Unigrafia Helsinki 2019 The work was granted three-year funding from the Finnish Cultural Foundation, and the Fulbright Center Finland endorsed it with a stipend for a semester’s visit to the Department of Mathematics of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. ABSTRACT Although our everyday perception of space tells us that it is composed of three spatial dimensions of length, height and width, it is possible to imagine a space having four spatial directions that are exactly identical with respect to each other, and meet at right angles. -
Benoit Faucher
Université de Montréal By Indirections Find Directions Out Thinkable Worlds in Abbott and Vonnegut Par Benoît Faucher Département de littérature comparée, Faculté des Arts et des Sciences Thèse présentée à la Faculté des Arts et des Sciences en vue de l'obtention du grade de PhD en Littérature option Épistémologie et théorie de la littérature Septembre, 2013 © Benoît Faucher, 2013 Abstract This thesis is concerned with the interaction between literature and abstract thought. More specifically, it studies the epistemological charge of the literary, the type of knowledge that is carried by elements proper to fictional narratives into different disciplines. By concentrating on two different theoretical methods, the creation of thought experiments and the framing of possible worlds, methods which were elaborated and are still used today in spheres as varied as modal logics, analytic philosophy and physics, and by following their reinsertion within literary theory, the research develops the theory that both thought experiments and possible worlds are in fact short narrative stories that inform knowledge through literary means. By using two novels, Abbott’s Flatland and Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan, that describe extra-dimensional existence in radically different ways, respectively as a phenomenologically unknowable space and as an outward perspective on time, it becomes clear that literature is constitutive of the way in which worlds, fictive, real or otherwise, are constructed and understood. Thus dimensions, established through extensional analogies as either experimental knowledge or modal possibility for a given world, generate new directions for thought, which can then take part in the inductive/deductive process of scientia. -
Flatland: a New Introduction
Princeton Science Library edition, 1991. Flatland: A New Introduction Thomas F. Banchoff Flatland first appeared over one hundred years ago and a dozen different editions have been published since then. Why now put out a new edition of this book in the Princeton Science Library? For each generation of readers, Edwin Abbott Abbott’s classic story of encounter between beings from different dimensions has had different significance. In 1884, the social satire on the limited perspective of Victorian England was as important as the comments on the use of analogy in treating higher dimensions, and both of these elements were clarified by the introduction to the second edition, purportedly written by an editor but actually written by Abbott himself. When the book was reissued in 1926, the main stimulus for considering higher dimensions was relativity theory, and a new introduction was written by William Garnett, a physicist student of Abbott’s. In 1952, when the first modern edition appeared, it was again a physicist, Banesh Hoffman, who wrote the introduction, referring to the connection between the dimensional analogy and the curvature of space. Other recent introductions have come from science-fiction and fantasy writers, a computer scientist, and a social historian. In our own day, there are new reasons to reconsider this book and its fundamental ideas. Abbott challenged his readers to imagine trying to understand the nature of phenomena in higher dimensions if all they could see directly were lowere-dimensional slices. That is precisely the situation that radiologists face today as they analyze the slides produced by CAT scans or magnetic resonance imaging, in attempts to reconstruct the forms of objects in space by studying their planar cross-sections.