| (quoted from Technical Error)
"Well, here is Dr. Hughes, gentlemen. He will -- ahem -- explain everything to you. I have asked him not to be too technical. You are at liberty to interrupt him if he ascends into the more rarefied statosphere of higher mathematics. Dr Hughes..."
Slowly, at first, and then more quickly as he gainted the confidence of his audience, the physicist began to tell his story. Nelson's diary drew a gasp of amazement from the Board, and the inverted coins proved fascinating curiosities. Hughes was glad to see that he had aroused the interest of his listeners. He took a deep breath and made the plunge he had been fearing.
"You have heard what has happened to Nelson, gentlement, but what I am going to tell you now is even more startling. I must ask you for your very clsoe attention."
He picked up a rectangular sheet of notepaper from the conference table, folded it along a diagonal and tore it along the fold.
"Here we have two right-angled triangles with equal sides. I lay them on the table -- so." He placed the paper triangles side by side on the table, with their hyptenuses touching, so that they formed a kite-shaped figure. "Now, as I have arranged them, each triangle is the mirror image of the other. You can imagine that the plane of the mirror is along the hypotneuse. This is the point I want you to notice. As long as I keep the triangles in the plane of the table, I can slide them around as much as I like, but I can never place one so that it exactly ocvers the other. Like a pair of gloves, they are not interchangeable although their dimensions are identical."
He paused to let that sink in. There were no comments, so he continued.
"Now, if I pick up one of the triangles, turn it over in the air, and put it down again, the two are no longer mirror images, but have become completely identical -- so." He suited the action ot the words. "This may seem very elementary; in fact it is so. But it teaches us one very important lesson. The triangles on the table were flat objects restricted to two dimensions. To turn one into its mirror image I had to lift it up and rotate it in the third dimension. Do you see what I'm driving at?"
He glanced around the table. One or two of the directors nodded slowly in dawning comprehension.
"Similarly, to change a solid, three-dimensional body, such as a man, into its analogue or mirror image, it must be rotated in a fourth dimension. I repeat -- a fourth dimension."
There was a strained silence. Someone coughted, but it was a nervous, not a skeptical cough.
"Four-dimensional geometry, as you know" -- he'd be surprised if they did -- "has been one of the major tools of mathematics since before the time of Einstein. But until now it has always been a mathematical fiction, having no real existence in the physical world. It now appears that the unheard-of currents, amounting to millions of amperes, which flowed momentarily in the windings of our generator must have produces a certain extention into four dimensions, for a fraction of a second and in a volume large enough to contain a man. I have been making some calculations and have been able to satisfy myself that a hyperspace about ten feet on a side was, in fact, generated: a matter of some ten thousand quartic -- not cubic! -- feet."
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