For a moment the Canterville ghost stood quite motionless in natural indignation … There was evidently no time to be lost, so, hastily adopting the Fourth Dimension of Space as a means of escape, he vanished through the wainscoting, and the house became quite quiet.
The Canterville Ghost (1887) by Oscar Wilde
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.
In 1879, the same year that the great physicist James Clerk Maxwell died and Albert Einstein was born, Zöllner published Transcendental Physics, a treatise attempting to explain how Slade performed the knot trick and other magical feats, such as removing wooden rings from a long cord, making solid objects disappear and reappear, and ‘summoning’ writing on untouched empty slates. Such acts, Zöllner concluded, were performed through access to the fourth dimension.
In Zöllner’s view, based on his readings of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant and the German mathematician Carl Gauss, the fourth dimension was as real as the three dimensions of space. Due to their prejudices, Zöllner thought, most people don’t perceive the fourth dimension, but they could if they were properly trained or had the natural gift Slade seemed to have.
Zöllner had ample precedent for reaching this seemingly audacious conclusion. The roots of connecting higher dimensions with a transcendental realm date back at least to Plato’s cave allegory, in which prisoners confined to a cavern observe two-dimensional shadows on a wall while being unaware of the three-dimensional world outside that produced them. But although Plato implied that we three-dimensional beings might be likewise oblivious to a greater reality, he didn’t explicitly argue that there was an actual fourth dimension.
A more immediate antecedent to Zöllner’s hypothesis is found in The Unseen Universe, a popular book published anonymously in 1875, and later revealed to have been co-authored by the Scottish mathematical physicists Balfour Stewart and Peter Guthrie Tait (a lifelong friend of Maxwell). The treatise speculates about links between scientific concepts such as conservation of energy and spiritual questions such as the persistence of life after death. In one brief passage, it connects the fourth dimension with an unseen realm:
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.
Zöllner knew enough about optical illusions to posit similarly that space’s restriction to three dimensions could simply be a persistent mirage. Perhaps, then, the world of the spirit, including all manner of psychic occurrences, had a perfectly natural explanation in a hitherto unexplored dimension. Goaded by the widespread interest in spiritualism at the time, Zöllner delved into connections between higher dimensions and the occult with greater gusto than anyone prior to him had dared. It was high time, he concluded, for the study of four-dimensional phenomena to be part of science.
Certain fringe groups, such as the Theosophical Society and the Society for Psychical Research (co-founded by Stewart), applauded this thesis, and began to promote the concept of the fourth dimension as a spiritual realm in their writings. Overall, however, Zöllner did not get the positive reaction he had sought from the mainstream scientific community. He was supported by only a handful of scientists – among them the British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace – and ignored or mocked by the vast majority.
Srila Prabhupada once said:
Therefore, in the Srimad-Bhagavatam it is said that this is the incarnation of God in this age. And who worships Him? The process is very simple. Just keep a picture of Lord Chaitanya with His associates.
