Sciences Participating with Arts & Culture in Education

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Intellectual Empathy with Ed Walters*¹: A Multi-dimensional Travelogue

Vrrrrrooooooom

The emerald flag flashes.

I accelerate.

My mind spins out on Speculation’s Speedway.

Losing control, I skid on gleaming whimsy slicks.

Fetid fumes of contradiction daze the weak-kneed as they watch.

Habitually I crash…

Reason’s icy medians, splintered.

Throngs of wide-eyed spectators disperse as racers fight to stay the course.

A single moment’s totality of multi-dimensional knowledge

is discovered…

stuffed

in a cognitive Gladstone Bag² beneath my seat.

Thankfully, I have sufficient badassery

to

force

it

shut.

Grandstand megaphones belch 1884’s undigested Flatland*³wafers

as geometric genius glows on massive jumbotrons.

Pursuing and pursued,

the racecar takes fallacious turns

causing sonic booms that short circuit my realities.

Thwaaaaaaack! THWAAAAAAACK!

I am now a distance runner

on another track,

in another space,

chasing Spot, the rabbit

down its

big,

black

hole.

Come with me!

Revelatory panoramas

from Alice’s Wonderland*^4a,4b

…redefined.

We touch the intangible.

Our reborn palates sample sweet and sour crudités, briny bites, and spicy, bitter herbs.

Peculiar aromatics mesh with sights and sounds of Neversensed

filling atmospheres with pungent postulations.

Diatribes by one-dimensional men*⁵ punctuate lengthy cadences of Doublespeak*⁶.

with murmured tomes of aggregate hypotheses, totalitarian politics, and 2020’s nanoworld;⁷

of fermions, bosons and anyons of hashtag 2D.

We crawl breathlessly through Zeroth’s Void

to point, X,

to line, X,

to square, X times Y, only to realise that

we are simple, two-dimensional cut-outs:

fragile rice paper fragments

sketching ourselves

with colourless markers

and blue ballpoint pen.

Monochrome.

X, Y, Z…when square transmutes to cubic;

complex,

captivating,

capriciously kinetic.

We are 3D forms thrust into kaleidoscopes,

whirling ‘round, and ‘round, and ‘round in Magyar’s Czárdás friss.⁸ [chahr-dahsh fri-is]

We celebrate with colorfulness of joy,

“Confetti to the power of three!”

From cube to tesseract, a 4D tetracube.

X, Y, Z,

and…

W.

I had wondered what would follow Z

and discovered they

had shifted alphabetic gears, moving in reverse towards Cube’s next iteration in ninety degree

per-

pen-

dic-

u-

lar-

i-

ty.

Length, width, breadth and trength!⁹

Elusively Dynamic Inseparable Temporality and Space.

Fourth dimension’s synchronous EDITS

are wrinkling our time!*¹⁰

We twinkle:

multi-faceted stars in never-ending diagrams.

            Nested prisms in perpetual motion have exploded!

A zillion brilliant tetracubes spiral across galaxies of imperceptibility.

We rub our eyes straining to see our 4D transformations through earth-locked 3D lenses.

Let Minkowski Spacetime¹¹ rock us into Nth dimensions!

Wrapped in “Good Vibrations.”^12.

Supercharged by Infrared.*¹³

“Ride Captain Ride upon your mystery ship
On your way to a world that others might have missed”¹⁴

At Odyssey’s next port of call, we’ll disembark.

“Cheers to champagne soul!”¹⁵, hoisting a toast before the Fifth Dimension*¹⁶

takes us “Up, Up, and Away”¹⁷ in phantasmagorical balloons.

Dangling and determined, we grasp ethereal strands of Superstrings;^*18,19

Vibrational cascades from 4D and beyond.

Concealed dark matter attempts to pull us down.²⁰

We resist, clinging tightly to serrated tendril waves.

In our distress we ponder past and present particles…where time is not.

Gossamer matrices; spanning, spinning, suspended along otherworldly highways;

to the theory of everything,

the theory of nothing

or intelligent design.

Surfing aeriform spume in extramundane realms.

for the mega something, the big bang,

or the indications of significance.

Swoosh, Swish, Swooshhhhhhhh!

The checkered flag

waves IN…MY…FACE…

Voiceless finish lines shriek, “STOP!”

Substandard finale.

No balloons. No ships.

No rabbit. No track.

No grandstand. No car.

No longer we.

Solus.

At my feet…

an empty Gladstone Bag.²

Reference List

Cultural, Literary, and Scientific

¹Schepisi, Fred, director, IQ, [film, romantic comedy], Paramount Pictures, 1994. *Ed Walters, a car mechanic, [character] played by Tim Robbins, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110099/ .

²Ellis et al, [article] “History of the Gladstone Bag”,

https://www.mackenzieleatheredinburgh.com/2020/02/01/history-of-the-gladstone/ .

*Gladstone Bag, a briefcase, doctor’s bag.

³Abbott, Edwin A., Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. Illustrated Kindle Edition, 2020 UK. Originally,1884.

^4aCarroll, Lewis, (Dodgson, Charles Lutwidge), Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 1865, UK

^4bCarroll, Lewis, (Dodgson, Charles Lutwidge), Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There, UK, 1871.

⁵Marcuse, Herbert, One-Dimensional Man, Beacon Press, USA, 1991. Originally,1964.

⁶Orwell, George, (Blair, Richard), 1984, UK, 1949.

⁷Castelvecchi, Davide, “Welcome anyons! Physicists find best evidence yet for long-sought 2D structures”, , [article] July 2020, https:/www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01988-0, 2020.

⁸Editors of Encyclopaedia Brittannica, [article] “Czardas, Hungarian dance”, “Encyclopaedia Brittannica”, 2017. Brittannica.com, [url=https://www.brittannica.com/art/czardas]https://www.brittannica.com/art/czardas[/url]. Accessed January 9, 2021.*friss, the fastest segment with dancers’ high-speed spinning.

⁹English, Trevor, Interesting Engineering, [Article] “Understanding the Fourth Dimension From Our 3D Perspective”, May04, 2017. https://interestingengineering.com/understanding-fourth-dimension-3d-perspective .

¹⁰L’Engle, Madeleine, A Wrinkle in Time, Ariel Books, USA, 1982. ^,

¹¹Musser, George, Scientific American, [Article] “What is Spacetime?” June 2018. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-spacetime? .

¹²Wilson, Brian and Love, Mike et al,*“Good Vibrations“ [song], recorded by the Beach Boys, Capital Records, 1966.

¹³Royal Institute of Technology, [article] “Nanotechnology breakthrough enables conversion of infrared light to energy”, 2019.  https://phys.org/news/2019-10-nanotechnology-breakthrough-enables-conversion-infrared.html .

¹⁴Visconti, John, Culture Sonar.com, [article] “The One-Hit-Wonder File: Ride Captain Ride”, Jauary 09, 2020.https://www.culturesonar.com/the-one-hit-wonder-file-ride-captain-ride/, “Ride Captain Ride” [song], written by Pinera, Mike and Konte, Skip, recorded by Blues Image, 1970.

¹⁵“Champagne Soul”, music style, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_5th_Dimension .

¹⁶Fifth Dimension, American vocal group, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_5th_Dimension .

¹⁷Web, Jimmy, “Up, Up and Away” [song] recorded by the 5^th Dimension, Johnny Rivers Music, Hollywood, California.1967.

¹⁸NASA, Imagine the Universe, [Article] “Big Questions: Superstrings” https://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/science/questions/superstring.html .

¹⁹Williams, Matt, Universe Today, “Universe of 10 Dimensions”, [article], 2014, httos://phys.org/news/2014-12-universe-dimensions.html .

²⁰Whitlock, Laura, (Project Leader)  Starchild, [Article] “Dark Matter” https://starchild.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/StarChild/universe_level2/darkmatter.html .