（外文电子版资料）Benford, Gregory - Fourth Dimension.pdfVIP

file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Gregory%20Benford%20-%20Fourth%20Dimension.txt GREGORY BENFORD THE FOURTH DIMENSION Suppose that next to you, right now, a pale gray sphere appeared. It grew from baseball-sized to a diameter as big as you -- grainy, gray, cool to the touch -- then shrank to a point . . . and disappeared. You would probably interpret it as a balloon blown up, then deflated. But where did the flat balloon go? Or you could realize that you had been visited by a denizen of a higher dimension -- a four dimensional sphere, or hypersphere. In three dimensions, it looks like a sphere, the most perfect of figures, just as a sphere projected in two dimensions makes a circle. The fact that this isnt an everyday occurrence implies that travel between dimensions is uncommon, but not that it is illogical. Probably you would not have thought of such ideas before 1884. That is due to the Reverend Edwin Abbott Abbott, M.A., D.D., headmaster of the City of London School. Respected, well liked, he led a strictly regular life, as proper as a parallelogram. He had published quite a few conventional books with titles like Through Nature to Christ, Parables for Children and How to Tell the Parts of Speech. These did not prepare the world for his sudden excursion into the fantastic, in 1884. Beneath his exterior he was a bit odd, and his short novel Hatland has proved his only hedge against oblivion, an astonishingly prescient fantasy of mathematics. Abbotts oddity began with his repeated name, which a mathematical wit might see as A times A or A Squared, A[sup 2]. Abbotts protagonist is A Square, a much troubled spirit. Liberated into another character, Abbott seems to have broken out of his cover as a prim reverend, and poured out his feelings. The book has a curiously obsessive quality, which perhaps accounts for its uneasy reception. Reviewers termed it soporific, prolix, mortally tedious, desperately facetious, while others fo