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xii
preface
I first became excited about the possibility of a fourth dimension as a child
watching a TV rerun of the 1959 science-fiction movie The 4D Man. This
clever thriller described the adventures of a scientist who develops a method of
transposing matter, enabling him to pass through walls, windows, water, and
women. Here is a snippet of the movie's dialogue:
Scott Nelson: That's what you've done with your force field. You've compressed
the energy of years into a moment.
Linda Davis: But. . . that's like . . . the fourth dimension.
Captain Rogers: I don't believe it. I'm a cop. I work with facts. Now I have
to start looking for something that saps the life out of a man like juice
out of an orange.
Tony Nelson: Nothing can stop him. Can't imprison him or surround him
with men or guns or tanks. No walls thick enough or guns strong
enough. A man in the fourth dimension is indestructible.
The movie has a bevy of Hollywood stars—Patty Duke and Lee Meriwether,
just to mention two. The plot involved a scientist discovering a dimension in
which he can walk through solid matter. I hope I'm not ruining the movie by
telling you the bizarre ending where he materializes out of the fourth dimension
into our three-dimensional world while passing through a brick wall. Ouch!
You can't imagine how profoundly affected I was by the blurring of fact and
fiction. To a young boy, the strange array of physical and mathematical ideas
made the unbelievable seem a frighteningly real possibility. I knew that if an
accessible fourth dimension existed, it would actually be possible to escape
from a prison by temporarily going into the fourth dimension—like a bird
leaving its nest for the first time, flying upward, and joyfully revelling in its
newly found third dimension.
My fascination with the fourth dimension was later stimulated by Steven Spielberg's
1982 movie Poltergeist in which a family living in a suburban development
is faced with menacing phenomena: a child who disappears, furniture that moves
by itself, and weird powers gusting through the house and frightening everyone.
Do any of you recall the Poltergeist scene in which balls are thrown into a
closet and then seem to magically reappear from the ceiling in another location
in the house? This could easily be explained if the ball took a route through the
fourth dimension—as you will learn later in this book. Even the early 1960s
TV show The Outer Limits touched on higher dimensions. In one particularly
poignant episode, a creature from the Andromeda galaxy lived in a higher
dimension than ours and was pulled into our universe as a result of terrestrial