“Not a bit like a detective story—is it?”
from The Tangled Miracle (143)
Coffee was served on a long, stone-flagged veranda overlooking the wide lawns at the back of the house. Behind the guests, as they sat facing the Sound, were the open windows of the morning-room, and Rhoda thought she heard a muffled noise inside as they settled down in a semi-circle.
“It’s been arranged this way,” she thought, turning her chair a little in the hope of observing the windows, “so that somebody inside can hear what Hood is going to say. Is it Mrs. Leckie Smith they’re keeping out of sight?”
But her speculations were halted by a sudden hush in the chatter around her. They were listening to Hood, who was sitting next to Rivers, and had drifted into conversation with him on the topic which had been the reason for the gathering. “Go right on—go right on,” Garth whispered to him.
“Well, I was just asking Mr. Rivers,” Hood began in a louder tone, “if he remembered the old trick movies—twenty years ago. There was one in particular—a comedy—in which a man was being chased all over the place. You remember they nearly always had some sort of a chase in the comedies in those days—well, and in the more serious pictures too. The chase,” he digressed, with a hint of deeper significance in his manner, “possesses universal appeal. To hunt—to capture—to find something that has been lost—it’s the great lure! However, I was going to say—the man in this comedy escaped his pursuers by all sorts of clever stunts, done with trick photography. He got on a roof, I remember, and when the crowd was within reaching distance, he jumped over—but instead of landing in a heap, he broke up into cubes as he went down. The cubes were strewn over the sidewalk like kiddies’ blocks, but they were suddenly jerked together, and there was the man again—alive—and he darted off in a fresh sprint. And then he ran through a lot of rooms and passages—flinging doors open—and when he came to one that was locked he reduced himself to the thinness of a piece of paper and slid under the door—the way you’d slide a letter through. I’ve often wished I had that picture. It would make an excellent introduction to a lecture on the fourth dimension. Audiences find it hard to get in to the subject. What I usually do is this.”
He took a letter from one pocket and a pencil from another. He unfolded the letter and spread it flat.
“This paper has only two dimensions—length and breadth. It has a little thickness, of course, but let us pretend, for the moment, that it hasn’t. And let’s pretend that it is a sheet of paper thousands of miles in extent—a flat world. On this world you could draw a picture of a man—like the one who slipped under the door—a man of only two dimensions—a flat man. Suppose that this man is you, Mr. Rivers. If you were really flat—living in a two-dimensional world—you would have no experience of thickness or height. Let me show you what I mean.”
He pulled a table toward him and rapidly drew something on the paper. Holding it up, he displayed a crude, childish picture of a man’s figure and a square.
“In a flat world there could be no such thing as a room—with walls, I mean. There would be no height. A square would be the equivalent of a room—and the four lines that enclose it would be sufficient to keep the man out. The lines are merely the thickness of a pencil mark on paper—but that is also the thickness of the man. To him the lines are as thick as himself. He can’t get over them or under them. In a perfectly flat world the words ‘under’ and ‘over’ would have no meaning.”
Hood paused and smiled. “Don’t get this mixed up with the old notion that the earth is flat. The world I’m talking about is utterly fictitious—merely to provide an analogy. Here it is. If a three-dimensional object—like this pencil—which has length, breadth, and thickness—were to enter this flat world—you see what would happen.”
As he spoke he punctured the paper with the point of the pencil and pushed it through.
“It’s impossible for you to look at this the way a flat person would. You see the pencil sticking out above the surface of the paper and below it. But the flat person—only able to see flatness—or, in other words, lines—would see only the tiny portion of the pencil which goes through his world. He would see it as a line. Is this clear, so far?”
There was a murmur which indicated that one or two of Hood’s listeners had not been able to follow.
“Look,” cried the scientist. “In your mind’s eye—cut off the pencil above and below the paper—cut it off so that all you have left is the part that goes through the paper—which is the thickness of the paper—which is the thickness of a line. That is all the flat person would see—not a pencil at all—but a strange line which has suddenly appeared in his world, apparently out of nowhere—not made with hands, so to speak. In other words—a miracle!”
There was a stir of new interest as Hood used the word which had been in all their minds so frequently in the last few days. Rivers leaned forward and fixed his glance on the pencil as though hypnotized by it.
“Now,” went on Hood, “let’s carry the idea a step farther. Suppose this pencil were blue from the point to the centre, and red from the centre to the rubber at the other end—half blue—half red. If I were to push the blue end through the flat world—the flatlanders would see a blue line, wouldn’t they? If I kept on pushing until the red portion went through—they would see a red line. In other words, they would think that the blue line had become red, without anybody touching it. It would never occur to them that anything had gone through their world. They would say that the line had appeared in their world—out of another. And if I were to withdraw the pencil—like this—they would say that the line had disappeared—into another world, which they would not be able to grasp or understand. Either the appearance or the disappearance would be a mystery—a miracle.”
Rivers and Ogiltree nodded as Hood paused again. They were following his argument with concentrated attention. Garth and Spence looked blank. Garth was nearly asleep.
“You may have heard,” Hood went on, “that in some quarters time is regarded as the fourth dimension. If we go back to our red and blue lines, you will see how such an idea arises. When the red part of the pencil follows the blue portion through Flatland—the change from blue to red would not seem to occur in space. In other words, there would not be an appearance of two lines succeeding one another—one above the other. There would be no above. The pencil would be the thickness of a line—and the line would change from blue to red in time—it would become red the way a sunset changes colour while you sit and look at it. In other words, the flatlanders would say that the blue was in the past—and the red in the present. It would be inconceivable to them that the blue and the red could exist at the same time—outside of their world. And yet, you see, that is the explanation. The blue half of the pencil and the red half exist together in our world—and they don’t get in each other’s way. We can see the two halves as one pencil—as one body.”
“As one body,” repeated Rivers in a reverential whisper.
“Yes,” said Hood. “The analogy is really very clear. We are hazy about what the fourth dimension is—it’s direction—so to speak. But if there is a fourth dimension—the bodies in it would go through our world the way this pencil goes through this piece of paper. But we wouldn’t say they had gone through. We can’t understand how a person could step through a brick wall, for instance. If any one did, we would say it was a miracle.”
“It is a miracle,” cried Rivers, flashing a look of triumph around at the others. “It is a miracle. It has happened to us.”
Rhoda felt satisfied, as she glanced at the faces of the four directors, that Mortimer Hood had made a deep impression on them. Rivers had evidently grasped more of the scientist’s discourse than any of the others, and his enthusiastic acceptance of Hood’s theory—although it was only half sketched—made them feel that they could accept it too, without properly understanding it.
There was a sudden flurry of talk—very hazy and disjointed—but one thing emerged very clearly. The attitude of hostility toward Hood had completely disappeared. He was regarded as their ally, and a powerful one, able to convince the world—by scientific demonstration—that their leader’s physical assumption could have taken place.
But, if they were satisfied, Hood was not. Once having started on his favourite subject, he was not going to let them off so easily. He managed to stem the flow of talk and launched into another phase of his explanation, quoting such writers as Fechner, Zollner, Morosoff, Ouspensky, Hinton, Bragdon, and others. As soon as he dropped the analogy of Flatland, and attempted to hint at the possibilities of existence in four dimensions, his hearers found it difficult to follow him. Finally, after excursions into alchemy, theosophy, spiritualism, and metaphysics, he made an effort to sum up in simple language.
“It looks very much as though the normal, three dimensional world that we see and know so well,” he continued gravely, “is only a partial, distorted reflection or mirage of reality—falling as short of reality as man’s conception of this world would be if he could see nothing but shadows— like the man in Plato’s cave. We all have our different ideas of eternity—but let me suggest this. If there is such a thing as eternity it must be a world where there is less matter—and more time. I wonder if I can make that clear. Our ideas about matter have changed a great deal in recent years. To-day scientists are leaning to the view that there is no such thing as ‘dead’ matter—or what we used to call ‘substance.’ Instead of thinking that force acts on matter—moving it or changing it—it is now generally recognized that the matter and the force are the same thing. It is all force. The only thing in the universe that isn’t force, so to speak, is time. Motion in time is what produces—for us—the illusion of matter. In this table, for example, the illusion of solidity is caused by the motion of millions of molecules, whirling around like miniature solar systems, but very close together. When they are so close that their movements interlock, we say that they make up a ‘substance’ which is hard—solid. When their motion is freer—when we can see more force at work—more motion—we are not so conscious of what we call hardness—and we call such substances fluids. When the motion is still freer—the illusion of matter disappears entirely—and we have what we call a gas—invisible to the naked eye …”