Hinton provides detailed instructions to make tesseracts in his book, but care must be exercised in playing with these too much:
"A shudder ran down my spine when I read your reference to Hinton's cubes. I nearly got hooked on them myself in the nineteen-twenties. Please believe me when I say that they are
completely mind-destroying. The only person I ever met who had worked with them seriously was Francis Sedlak, aCzech neo-Hegelian Philosopher (he wrote a book called The Creation of Heaven and Earth) who lived in an Oneida-like community near Stroud, in Gloucestershire."
The letter from Hiram Barton, “a consulting engineer of Etchingham, Sussex, England” responding to Martin Gardner about an article of his on Hinton’s cubes.
Re:Views of the Tesseract (1904)
by schoen on Wednesday August 19, 2015 @07:16PM
(#10089167)
I remember that letter to Gardner!
It sounded like the colors represent offset in the fourth dimension, with particular rules for how the colors ought to shift in response to particular motions (including rotation). I think I met someone at a math camp who had played with these. I was wary of doing so because of that letter, which I took pretty seriously. But maybe it's no worse in practice than playing Tetris or Chess (which also train you to perceive particular spatial relationships, which people then famously imagine even when they're not playing).
Hinton provides detailed instructions to make tesseracts in his book, but care must be exercised in playing with these too much:
"A shudder ran down my spine when I read your reference to Hinton's cubes. I nearly got hooked on them myself in the nineteen-twenties. Please believe me when I say that they are completely mind-destroying. The only person I ever met who had worked with them seriously was Francis Sedlak, aCzech neo-Hegelian Philosopher (he wrote a book called The Creation of Heaven and Earth) who lived in an Oneida-like community near Stroud, in Gloucestershire."
The letter from Hiram Barton, “a consulting engineer of Etchingham, Sussex, England” responding to Martin Gardner about an article of his on Hinton’s cubes.
BTW, his son, Sebastian Theodore Hinton invented the jungle gym (http://winnetkahistory.org/gazette/j-is-for-jungle-gym/) based on his father's prototype.
It sounded like the colors represent offset in the fourth dimension, with particular rules for how the colors ought to shift in response to particular motions (including rotation). I think I met someone at a math camp who had played with these. I was wary of doing so because of that letter, which I took pretty seriously. But maybe it's no worse in practice than playing Tetris or Chess (which also train you to perceive particular spatial relationships, which people then famously imagine even when they're not playing).
http://www.math.union.edu/~dpvc/math/4d/rotation/welcome.htm...