THE FOURTH DIMENSION SIMPLY EXPLAINED

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semaphore while its arms are moving. A continuous opening would be left in this material as the semaphore is forced deeper and deeper into it. Suppose again that this opening were filled with plaster of Paris, and that the wax were melted away. We would then have left a solid body, every section of which would represent a phase of the semaphore, and which would contain in itself every position that the movable arms had assumed during the course of the experiment. This representation is in what we ordinarily call the solid form; that is, three-dimensional.

If an imaginary being with a two-dimensional sense, an "Inhabitant of Flat-Land," were to have this solid passed through his plane, he would see reproduced the continuous motion of the semaphore arms. Like our slit-eyed friend, the "Line-lander," and for analogous reasons, he could not conceive the simultaneous existence of all these cross sections. But by using his memory, he could reproduce some of them as separate pictures in his two-dimensional world -such pictures, perhaps, as we have in our kinetoscope film.
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If a small quantity of yeast were allowed to ferment between the slide and cover glass of a microscope, we should have under our observation the growth of an object in practically two dimensions. Now, its phases at very small intervals could be photographed, but the same conditions that met us in the case of the semaphore, face us again. The only way to represent all the changes that take place would involve the tracing of each point from one position to another. This would produce a line; and since two dimensions are required to present all the points in their relative positions at any given time, this line, in order not to he obscured, must extend beyond the two-dimensional space in which the growth takes place. We must, therefore, create a solid, whose successive sections would be recognized by the two-dimensional mind as the growth of the object which was passing through the plane of their consciousness. In our previous illustrations we were able by the use of two-dimensional space to fix permanently variations of position and magnitude of a one-dimensional object , and in threedimensional space we were able to fix permanently the changes of an object moving or growing in two dimensions. Coming now to the phenomena of our every-day world, we know that changes in position and growth take place continuously in our three-dimensional space, and that the time element is necessary to determine exactly the conditions of any variable or movable thing. Thus the description of a tree would give an entirely false impression, if only its dimensions were given without adding the particular time when these were taken; and the position of a planet would be incompletely given, unless the time of observation were
Page 106 reported together with the other three necessary measurements; even as the position of a ship upon the earth's surface is not known by its latitude and longitude unless we know also when these were calculated, and the idea of the temperature of a body would be incomplete unless the record of time accompanied the statement of the mercury's height above the zero mark.

If we could only picture to ourselves that a three-dimensional object is merely the cross section of a permanent four dimensional thing, that what we are cognizant of is merely a phase of a thing which exists in its entirety, and of whose other phases we are ignorant, till they are brought to our own consciousness or till our consciousness reaches them, then we could conceive the physical nature of a four-dimensional object. Considering, for instance, our own material bodies, Get any book for free on: www.Abika.com