The Tesseract Charles H. Hinton, eccentric, bigamist, son-in-law of George Boole (yes
that Boole) coined the word
Tesseract and claimed that we could all
visualize the fourth dimension. He wrote
several books and claimed to have created a set of cubes that, used properly, would allow anyone to visualize hyperspace. His ideas were all the rage. Salvador Dali was
inspired by him. Robert Heinlein wrote
a classic short story about a house built as an unfolded tesseract. Madeleine L'Engle wrote
a classic children's story. With the
advent of Einstein and his claim that "Time was the fourth dimension", the higher spatial dimensions were forgotten. (Until
recently that is) And Hinton was forgotten. Or was he? And what happened to the cubes? Rudy Rucker, a huge fan of Hinton,
fails to reprint the instructions. Rumours are that, if you build them and use them, they will
drive you insane.
posted by vacapinta
on Jul 9, 2002 -
22 comments
