When Science Met the Supernatural: The Strange History of the Fourth Dimension

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries—the period known as the fin de siècle—science and mysticism often overlapped in surprising ways. It was a time of rapid discovery: electric light, cinema, germ theory, and even flight. Yet as the world became more modern, people also turned to spiritual and philosophical ideas to explain the mysteries that science couldn’t. One of the most fascinating of these ideas was the “fourth dimension.”

The concept first gained attention with Flatland (1884), Edwin Abbott’s satirical story about a two-dimensional world. It inspired readers to imagine higher dimensions beyond the three we know. A few years later, mathematician and mystic Charles Howard Hinton took the idea further. He described the fourth dimension as a real, physical space that could be visualized using colored cubes called “tesseracts.” Hinton believed that understanding this hidden dimension could unlock new powers of perception—and perhaps even explain ghosts and psychic phenomena.

The idea spread through art and culture. Writers, painters, and poets—including members of the avant-garde—used the fourth dimension as a symbol for breaking free of traditional limits. Cubist painters like Picasso and Duchamp tried to depict objects from multiple perspectives at once, echoing Hinton’s geometry. Others, like the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, saw it as a gateway to the infinite.

Eventually, Einstein’s theory of relativity replaced these mystical visions with a scientific one: the fourth dimension became time, not spirit. Still, the dream of otherworldly dimensions never disappeared. It lived on in surrealism, science fiction, and even modern New Age thought. The story of the fourth dimension reminds us how deeply imagination and inquiry are connected—and how, in every age, people look beyond the visible world in search of something larger and more mysterious.

Read the full article “When Science Met the Supernatural: The Strange History of the Fourth Dimension” by Jon Crabb

🔭   This summary was human-edited with AI-assist.