alternate realities (1st draft)

Tereza Swanda
Visual Culture Project
November 8, 2008


Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions Crocheting the Hyperbolic Plane: An Interview with David Henderson and Diana Taimina, and Dream I Tell You
Lisa Randall, Margaret Wertheim, and Helene Cixous
(Preface and Introduction Annotation, Article Annotation and a Book Annotation)

Seeing should not necessarily connote believing. (See diagram) What we observe, have learned, and live within, may not be the confines of reality; may not be reality at all. Our knowledge is not written by men and taught as truths, as we at times grow up believing, but is constantly evolving, especially through women’s connections. These three authors, Randall, Wertheim and Cixous, present alternate realities; Linda Randall in scientific form, Margaret Wertheim in an interview with a couple of mathematicians, and Helene Cixous through dreams. I, myself came to these texts in indirect ways, not sought after in a linear fashion.

Lisa Randall, a physicist, presents not only a different understanding of the universe but also writes it from a different perspective. The two are not unrelated. She talks of her early encounters with science books prior to becoming a physicist, “I never felt sufficiently engaged or challenged. The tone often seemed condescending to readers, overly worshipful of scientists, or boring. I felt the authors mystified results or glorified the men who found them, rather than describing science itself and the process by which scientists made their connections.” (vii)
In at least the Preface and the Introduction of her volume Randall does both, keeps the reader both engaged in extraordinary possibilities and challenged. As for the tone, “I didn’t want to give the misleading impression that all physicists are modeled on a single archetype or that any one particular type or person should be interested in physics.” This is particularly relevant as I think it opens pathways for further connections not only within the scientific community but to all at large for mutual benefit. She postulates unseen dimensions that although currently improvable provide answers for gravity’s feebleness (opposed to a small magnet for example), possibility of extra dimensions stretching out to infinity in a curved spacetime, and a possible three-dimensional pocket of space. She presents “science as a living entity that continues to evolve.” (vii)

Margaret Wertheim discusses the hyperbolic plane, a non-Euclidean geometry that for over 150 years had not been presented in physical form until Daina Taimina, a mathematician and one of the interviewees of the article, resorted to crochet, a handicraft learned in Latvia, to create a physical model. “A hyperbolic plane is a surface in which the space curves away from itself at every point.” (Henderson, Taimina’s husband, 2) It is amazing what will escape a narrow mind. Wertheim points out, “We now know that there are actually many things in nature that exhibit this geometry-lettuce leaves, kelp, and various kinds of sea creatures, especially sea slugs, flat worms, and nudibranchs,” and asks “Why didn’t mathematicians recognize this before?” Henderson responds, “There were mathematicians who saw these things, but to think about them as geometry…just didn’t occur to them.” (6)

Helene Cixous, through her elegant writing is deeply aware of structures both on the surface and more importantly in a hidden universe of dreams. As she presents the text in her Forewarnings, “the dream dictates I obey eyes closed.” (1) She quickly destabilizes the reader asking, “Who is you?” (3) We too enter her dreams as dreamers through her intention; “I haven’t evaluated them: I remain their dreamer…No distance, however infinitesimal, allows me to re-read them…no third party has sat in judgment…” (9) Her dreams are written with a hand in the dark that none the less sees. We suspend our knowledge and enter them.

Who knows reality? We rule ourselves and others in accordance with laws we perceive. Once our perception is suspended, broken, blurred, and folded, what then of our laws? We need to relate in whole new ways thanks to the insights of these authors, physicists, mathematicians, dreamers, women.

sending you hugs