The occult roots of higher-dimensional research in physics

January 18, 2018 6:55 PM

Spiritual hyperplane: How spiritualists of the 19th century forged a lasting association between higher dimensions and the occult world.
posted by homunculus (15 comments total)

Einstein looking over at us from the fifth dimension while making chuckholes. That's where they come from.
posted by Oyéah at 8:18 PM on January 18, 2018

"Do you understand that a dimension is not a place?" has for a long time ranked highly in my standard markers of intelligence.
posted by I-Write-Essays at 8:36 PM on January 18, 2018 [7 favorites]

What an interesting piece—thanks for posting it! It ties together a bunch of things I had never thought to connect. (And Flatland is a lot of fun, for those of you unfamiliar with it.) I loved this bit of snark from the New York Times (November 17, 1880):

[Zöllner] has decided that inasmuch as he cannot explain the marvels which he witnessed in Slade’s presence by any hypothesis resting on known natural laws, they must inevitably be the work of intelligent but invisible beings dwelling in the fourth dimension of space. This postulate not only fully explains all the so-called phenomena of Spiritualism, but it explains a great deal more … Why does a piece of bread and butter, when dropped on the floor, fall, in nine cases out of 10, with its buttered side underneath? … The fourth-dimensional imps exercise an influence which is irresistibly felt by … bread and butter.

> "Do you understand that a dimension is not a place?" has for a long time ranked highly in my standard markers of intelligence.

Then you have a very unintelligent definition of intelligence. Understanding that a dimension is not a place has nothing to do with intelligence, it's a matter of specialized information. It would be like me using "Do you understand that variation in language is not a matter of 'correctness'?" as a marker of intelligence. That kind of thing is just a transparent attempt to shore up one's self-esteem: "I am one of the intelligent ones, and far superior to those cattle out there!" It's a good idea to get over it.
posted by languagehat at 6:06 AM on January 19, 2018 [14 favorites]

Johann Zöllner, a German physicist who studied optical illusions, could not believe his eyes. He had carefully prepared a rigorous test of the powers of the so-called spiritualist medium Henry Slade. By sealing both ends of a set of ropes and placing them on a tabletop under keen observation, there was no way that they could have been tied together. Yet, as clear as day, in front of other scientific witnesses – including the electrodynamics expert Wilhelm Weber and the noted philosopher Gustav Fechner – four knots had suddenly appeared where none had been.

Did they try a different table? That they picked, and in a different room? One is embarrassed for them, falling for the usual stage magic tricks of the 19th Century spiritualist.
posted by thelonius at 6:22 AM on January 19, 2018

A 1919 Popular Science discussion of how the knot trick may have been done:

Tying Knots In Endless Ropes
posted by zamboni at 7:39 AM on January 19, 2018 [3 favorites]

Many years ago on Lundy’s Lane in Niagara Falls, Ontario, there was something called The Houdini Museum. It contained many of his personal props and artifacts, and one very memorable item: a small, sealed box, which contained a pencil suspended over a sheet of paper. Houdini set forth a challenge: if someone could cause the pencil to write something legible with that pencil, without breaking the seals, they would win a sum of money. The caveat: should the seals be broken and no message found, the person claiming automatic writing skills would forfeit a similar sum. As of the late 70s, not a single person had come forward to venture an attempt and the box remained sealed. (The museum was destroyed in a fire a few years later.)

Spiritualism isn’t entirely gone. The curious would do well to visit Lilydale, a small Victorian community in western New York State—the largest Spiritualist community in the world.
posted by kinnakeet at 8:12 AM on January 19, 2018 [3 favorites]

The museum was destroyed in a fire a few years later.

When the telekinetics can't accomplish the goal, send in the pyrokinetics!
posted by FatherDagon at 10:09 AM on January 19, 2018 [9 favorites]

The past ate my comment, some trick of the keyboard, it was profound, and it is set now, in the past, and I am the only witness. Where is the warehouse of things that never happened?
posted by Oyéah at 10:59 AM on January 19, 2018 [2 favorites]

This was quite good but for a tacit reason: the article outlines the development of a certain bit of physics from what's basically alchemy into actual science. The development of chemistry has proceeded along similar lines (speculation, nonsense, fraud, wishful thinking, gradually evolving into something rigorous and systematic and testable).

It was mildly annoying the article spent so much time on the fraudster Slade, since the simple impulse behind the whole direction of thought is elementary extrapolation from Euclidean geometry:

Just as points are the terminations of lines, lines the boundaries of surfaces, and surfaces the boundaries of portions of space of three dimensions: so we may suppose our (essentially three-dimensional) matter to be the mere skin or boundary of an Unseen whose matter has four dimensions.

There's not heaps to criticise there, and (to argue from authority, but the authority of a century of physics) Einstein himself conceded higher-dimensional formalisations were probably necessary.

So are there really "occult" roots behind the development of this bit of physics? It feels like there's a half-hearted handwave in the direction of spiritualism and a grab-bag of pop culture references, but not much else. Referring to (e.g.) Jack Parsons might have been a good start at actually working toward the thesis in the title.
posted by iffthen at 5:44 AM on January 20, 2018 [2 favorites]

Hey, they referenced the Dancing Wu Li Masters, and I was one of those recruits to genuine science, because it was one of the first physics books I read as a young teen, and I went on to do a degree. Now the "this is revealed truth because of etymology in a foreign-to-the-presumed-audience language" trope is one of my pet hates ("Wu Li" is explained as having several meanings in Chinese, don't know how the facts shake out on that), but it was stimulating enough for me back in the day.

I would argue that using the term "dimension" to mean a kind of place is a bit more like using "passive voice" to describe any formal sentence structure you don't like... would be boorish to quiz people on it, but if you choose to steal professional terminology to make yourself sound smarter, you're fair game.
posted by Wrinkled Stumpskin at 6:57 AM on January 20, 2018

but if you choose to steal professional terminology to make yourself sound smarter, you're fair game

But popular culture is absolutely inundated with examples of "dimension" being used to refer to a kind of place. Someone who lacks mathematical training beyond the high-school level (give or take, your high school curriculum may vary) ought to be forgiven for using this word in the manner of a non-specialist.

In fact, I'm willing to go farther; I think it's fair to say the word simply has multiple definitions at this point and it's unfair to get on someone's back over using the popular, nontechnical definition of the word no matter their background. Our language is generally capable of handling words that have multiple related but distinct definitions. Etymology is not destiny, as is sometimes said.

(This goes out the window when someone is claiming to be writing about real math or science, naturally. Cranks and dilettantes misusing the technical term in a purported academic context should be sternly encouraged to curb their ambitions until they've grasped their basics.)
posted by a mirror and an encyclopedia at 8:03 AM on January 20, 2018 [5 favorites]

that is: cranks, dilettantes, and dear god journalists especially
posted by a mirror and an encyclopedia at 8:05 AM on January 20, 2018

More at Aeon: How many dimensions are there, and what do they do to reality? Relativity says we live in four dimensions. String theory says it’s 10. What are ‘dimensions’ and how do they affect reality?
posted by homunculus at 10:08 AM on January 22, 2018

New thread.
posted by homunculus at 10:09 AM on January 22, 2018

A 1919 Popular Science discussion of how the knot trick may have been done:

Tying Knots In Endless Ropes

OK, I'm just grooving on the whole issue.

A Tax on seats in trees!
Call buttons in hospitals!
Telescopic gun sights!
Steel car wheels replace wood!
Portable phones (two stories)!
Dress a chicken in 12 seconds!
And the real kicker - Making the tides work for us; subtitled When the world's coal supply in exhausted we'll turn to tide motors!
posted by achrise at 12:09 PM on January 22, 2018