Surely the mercury did not trace this line in any of the dimensions of Space generally recognized?" The hero of "The Time Machine" was a time traveler who used ivory levers and quartz rods. "This line I trace with my finger shows the movement of the barometer. Wells, explaining the fourth dimension years before mathematicians and physicists had worked out the details. ![]() "Here is a popular scientific diagram, a weather record," said a famous fictional character, the Time Traveler of H. It started innocently enough, with mundane items like railroad scheduling charts and weather histograms: new graphical representations of time. Our sight expanded into the fourth dimension. "To myself," Isaac Newton remarked modestly, "I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me." Then-and perhaps most important of all-we learned to see faster. We figured out some things about color and space. in all kinds of water, standing in the open air, animalcules can turn up," noted Anton van Leeuwenhoek, the first man to observe bacteria. Surprise! "In all falling rain, carried from gutters into water-butts, animalcules are to be found. We noticed quasars and we noticed viruses. ![]() We saw where earth is and what humans are (if not quite who we are). We extended our sight far beyond the tiny spectrum our unaided eyes could handle, from violet to red. ![]() And infrared vision, and ultraviolet vision, and gamma-ray vision and nuclear-magnetic-resonant vision. No wonder our superheroes had X-ray vision so did we. We figured out the art, the geometry and the semantics of perspective. Partway through the millennium, we figured out how to shape and polish glass so as to see far and to see small, and we dug into dead languages of previous millenniums to name our new aids to seeing-telescope, microscope, spectroscope, spectrophotometer, spectroheliograph and, eventually, television.
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