Abstract
The notion of a higher geometrical dimension, “the fourth dimension of space,” has been a vital stimulus for both writers of science fiction and artists since the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Indeed, it was science fiction writers like H. G. Wells who first responded to the new popular interest in the fourth dimension, over a decade before artists began to engage the idea. And before that, both E. A. Abbott’s Flatland of 1884 and the “Scientific Romances” of hyperspace philosopher Charles Howard Hinton, published in the mid-1880s and mid-1890s, contributed significantly to the popularization of the idea of higher spatial dimensions. This essay explores the usages of the spatial fourth dimension by wells and subsequent science fiction writers as well as cubist painters and the artist Robert Smithson.
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Notes
- 1.
This essay draws upon and expands content in the new edition of my 1983 book The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013) as well as the original publication. For the discussions of Hinton and Bragdon that follow, see Henderson, Fourth Dimension, Chaps. 1, 4.
- 2.
See Claude Bragdon, A Primer of Higher Space (The Fourth Dimension) (Rochester, NY: The Manas Press, 1913), which is now available in digital form from the Internet Archive. On the importance of the X-ray in relation to the fourth dimension, see Henderson, “Reintroduction,” in Fourth Dimension, rev. ed. (2013), pp. 14–18.
- 3.
See Charles Howard Hinton, The Fourth Dimension (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1904), Chap. 4.
- 4.
For these stories, see H. G. Wells, The Country of the Blind and Other Stories (London and New York: T. Nelson & Sons, 1913), pp. 87–100 (“The Remarkable Case of Davidson’s Eyes”) and pp. 204–30 (“The Plattner Story”).
- 5.
See H. G. Wells, The Time Machine: An Invention (London: W. Heinemann, 1895), Chap. 1. On the delayed popularization of Relativity Theory, following the confirmation of one of Einstein’s postulates by an eclipse expedition in November 1919, see, e.g., Helge Kragh, Quantum Generations: A History of Atomic Physics in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), pp. 98–104.
- 6.
For Ouspensky’s philosophy, see Henderson, Fourth Dimension, Chap. 5.
- 7.
Gaston de Pawlowski, “Le Léviathan,” Comoedia, Dec. 24, 1909, p. 1. The following discussion is drawn from Henderson, Fourth Dimension, rev. ed. (2013), pp. 151–56, 466–67. Chapters of Pawlowski’s Voyage were published over the course of 1909–1910 and 1912 in different series in Comoedia. His book of this title appeared in later 1912 (Paris: Eugène Fasquelle, 1912) and was published in a revised edition in 1923 (Paris: Eugène Fasquelle, 1923; Paris: Denoël, 1971). Pawlowski’s statement about “all phenomena and their opposites” in the next paragraph occurs in the 1923 revised edition, pp. 15–16.
- 8.
The discussion of Cubist painting in the following paragraph parallels the argument I have made in Henderson, “Editor’s Introduction II. Cubism, Futurism, and Ether Physics in the Early Twentieth Century,” in Science in Context, 17 (Winter 2004), pp. 445–66.
- 9.
See, e.g., Lewis Padgett, “Mimsy were the Borogoves,” in A Treasury of Science Fiction, ed. Groff Conklin (New York: Crown Publishers, 1948); and Arthur C. Clarke, “Technical Error,” in Reach for Tomorrow (New York: Ballantine Books, 1956).
- 10.
Robert Heinlein, “—And He Built a Crooked House,” in Fantasia Mathematica, ed. Clifton Fadiman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1958), p. 83.
- 11.
For Forakis’s sculpture and its relation to Bragdon, see Henderson, “Reintroduction,” to Fourth Dimension (2013), pp. 61–63; and Linda Dalrymple Henderson, “Claude Bragdon, the Fourth Dimension, and Modern Art in Cultural Context,” in Claude Bragdon and the Beautiful Necessity, ed. Eugenia Ellis and Andrea Reithmayr (Rochester, New York: Rochester Institute of Technology, 2010), pp. 61–63.
- 12.
On these approaches, see Henderson, Fourth Dimension, Chaps. 1, 5.
- 13.
See J. W. Dunne, An Experiment with Time (New York: The Macmillan Co, 1927).
- 14.
See Mark Clifton, “Star, Bright,” in The Mathematical Magpie, ed. Clifton Fadiman (NewYork: Simon and Schuster, 1962), pp. 70–96.
- 15.
See A. J. Deutsch, “A Subway Named Moebius,” in Fantasia Mathematica, ed. Clifton Fadiman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1958), pp. 222–36.
- 16.
Clifton, “Star, Bright,” p. 85.
- 17.
Ibid., p. 86.
- 18.
Ibid., p. 89.
- 19.
Ibid., p. 95.
- 20.
Ibid., p. 96.
- 21.
For Gardner’s Scientific American articles and book as well as Smithson’s response to it, see Henderson, “Reintroduction” to Fourth Dimension (2013), pp. 50–55, 58–61. Images of Smithson’s sculptures are readily accessible at www.robertsmithson.com.
- 22.
On Smithson and Duchamp, see Henderson, “Reintroduction” to Fourth Dimension (2013), pp. 57–58; on Duchamp and the fourth dimension, see ibid., pp. 38–42 and Chap. 4.
- 23.
Peter Hutchinson, “Science Fiction: An Aesthetic for Science,” Art International, 12 (Oct. 1968), 33.
- 24.
Ibid, pp. 33–34.
- 25.
See, e.g., The New Yorker, 29 (Dec. 5, 1953) for an image of a later Gourielli “Fourth Dimension” ad (1955), see Henderson, “Reintroduction” to Fourth Dimension, rev. ed. (2013), p. 11.
- 26.
For this Doug Trumbull comment, quoted in Gene Youngblood’s 1970 book Expanded Cinema, see Ibid, p. 66.
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Henderson, L.D. (2015). Science Fiction, Art, and the Fourth Dimension. In: Emmer, M. (eds) Imagine Math 3. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01231-5_7
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