Bruce Clarke
A Scientific Romance:
Thermodynamics and the Fourth Dimension in Charles Howard Hinton's
"The Persian King"

NOTES

I want to thank Linda D. Henderson, who made this essay happen, 

and Michael Wutz, for his helpful suggestions.


1
"Appended to the essay 'Hypercubes' in Martin Gardener's book 

Mathematical Carnival, there is a curious letter from a former user 

of Hinton's cubes who calls them 'completely mind-destroying'" 

(Rucker, Speculations xv).

2
On James Hinton, the author of prose works promoting universal 

altruism popular with social radicals such as Edward Carpenter and 

the Havelock Ellises, see Ballard 6-12, and Ellis. "The father James 

Hinton was an ear surgeon who was best known for The Mystery 

of Pain, a little book which sets forth the Panglossian thesis that 'all 

that which we feel as painful is really giving--something that our 

fellows are better for, even though we cannot trace it.' It gives some 

idea of the turn of the son Charles Hinton's mind to learn that he 

wrote a piece, 'The Persian King,' in which he attempted to use 

higher dimensions and infinite series to obtain a mathematically 

accurate model of this idea" (Rucker, Speculations v).

3
Hinton includes this essay in The Fourth Dimension under the title 

"A Recapitulation and Extension of the Physical Argument."

4
See Fletcher's "Daemonic mechanism and allegorical 'machines'": 

"Constriction of meaning, when it is the limit put upon a personified 

force or power, causes that personification to act somewhat 

mechanistically. The perfect allegorical agent is not a man possessed 

by a daemon, but a robot" (Allegory 55).

5
"Eighteenth-century physicists had considered energy losses 

within mechanical systems to be isolated from nonmechanical 

processes, and therefore they did not enunciate a theory of the 

equivalence of heat and mechanical energy.

The concept of the conservation of mechanical energy was, 

however, to be found in eighteenth-century treatises on mechanics; it 

was familiar, in the form first enunciated by Leibniz, as the principle

of the conservation of vis viva ('living force')" (Harman 35-36).