232
PHVSICS OF THE IMPOSSIBLE
Gauss left it to his student, Georg Bernhard Riemann, to write
down the fundamental mathematics of higher dimensions (which
were then imported wholesale decades later into Einstein's theory of
general relativity). In one powerful sweep, in a celebrated lecture Riemann delivered in 1854, he overthrew two thousand years of Greek
geometry and established the basic mathematics of the higher, curved
dimensions that we use even today.
After Riemann's remarkable discovery was popularized in Europe
in the late 1800s, the "fourth dimension" became quite a sensation
among artists, musicians, writers, philosophers, and painters. Picasso's cubism, in fact, was partly inspired by the fourth dimension,
according to art historian Linda Dalrymple Henderson. (Picasso's
paintings of women with eyes facing forward and nose to the side was
an attempt to visualize a fourth-dimensional perspective, since one
looking down from the fourth dimension could see a woman's face,
nose, and the back of her head simultaneously.) Henderson writes,
"Like a Black Hole, the 'fourth dimension' possessed mysterious qualities that could not be completely understood, even by the scientists
themselves. Yet, the impact of 'the fourth dimension' was far more
comprehensive than that of Black Holes or any other more recent scientific hypothesis except Relativity Theory after 1919."
Other painters drew from the fourth dimension, as well. In Salvador Dali's Christus Hypercubius, Christ is crucified in front of a
strange, floating three-dimensional cross, which is actually a "tesseract," an unraveled four-dimensional cube. In his famous Persistence of
Memory, he attempted to represent time as the fourth dimension, and
hence the metaphor of melted clocks. Marcel Duchamps's Nude Descending a Staircase was an attempt to represent time as the fourth dimension by capturing the time-lapse motion of a nude walking down
a staircase. The fourth dimension even pops up in a story by Oscar
Wilde, "The Canterville Ghost," in which a ghost haunting a house
lives in the fourth dimension.
The fourth dimension also appears in several of H. G. Wells's
works, including The Invisible Man, The Planner Story, and The Wonderful Visit. (In the latter, which has since been the basis of scores of
PHVSICS OF THE IMPOSSIBLE
Gauss left it to his student, Georg Bernhard Riemann, to write
down the fundamental mathematics of higher dimensions (which
were then imported wholesale decades later into Einstein's theory of
general relativity). In one powerful sweep, in a celebrated lecture Riemann delivered in 1854, he overthrew two thousand years of Greek
geometry and established the basic mathematics of the higher, curved
dimensions that we use even today.
After Riemann's remarkable discovery was popularized in Europe
in the late 1800s, the "fourth dimension" became quite a sensation
among artists, musicians, writers, philosophers, and painters. Picasso's cubism, in fact, was partly inspired by the fourth dimension,
according to art historian Linda Dalrymple Henderson. (Picasso's
paintings of women with eyes facing forward and nose to the side was
an attempt to visualize a fourth-dimensional perspective, since one
looking down from the fourth dimension could see a woman's face,
nose, and the back of her head simultaneously.) Henderson writes,
"Like a Black Hole, the 'fourth dimension' possessed mysterious qualities that could not be completely understood, even by the scientists
themselves. Yet, the impact of 'the fourth dimension' was far more
comprehensive than that of Black Holes or any other more recent scientific hypothesis except Relativity Theory after 1919."
Other painters drew from the fourth dimension, as well. In Salvador Dali's Christus Hypercubius, Christ is crucified in front of a
strange, floating three-dimensional cross, which is actually a "tesseract," an unraveled four-dimensional cube. In his famous Persistence of
Memory, he attempted to represent time as the fourth dimension, and
hence the metaphor of melted clocks. Marcel Duchamps's Nude Descending a Staircase was an attempt to represent time as the fourth dimension by capturing the time-lapse motion of a nude walking down
a staircase. The fourth dimension even pops up in a story by Oscar
Wilde, "The Canterville Ghost," in which a ghost haunting a house
lives in the fourth dimension.
The fourth dimension also appears in several of H. G. Wells's
works, including The Invisible Man, The Planner Story, and The Wonderful Visit. (In the latter, which has since been the basis of scores of