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Study 078 - The Plattner Story (Patreon)

Published:
2024-02-15 14:00:05
Edited:
2024-02-21 02:53:58
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

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Content

We're entering the fourth dimension with The Plattner Story by H.G. Wells!

Special thanks to reader Erik Peabody of Viking Guitar Productions. Check out his full reading of our own Chris Lackey's short story SNACK TIME on the Horror Hill Podcast!

What is the Fourth Dimension? by Charles Howard Hinton.

MADBALLS!

Outro track - OBLITERATOR by Viking Guitar

Intro track - Gnossienne: No. 1 by Erik Satie

Files

Comments

Steve

Your link above says Haunted Hill Podcast when it's Horror Hill. Always with the criticism.

Steve

If you flip a 2d object though the third dimension, you also have to turn it over. So presumably if you flip something three dimensional through the fourth dimension, you also turn it inside out.

Steve

Time is sometimes called the 4th dimension, as in space-time, but it's really something very different as time is present in all the other spatial dimensions. Movement in time implies a change in the spatial dimensions. In other theories of physics, up to 11 spatial dimensions are used to unify various other theories such as gravity and relativity. In these theories, the other dimensions are curled up very small so they aren't visible in the usual three spatial dimensions. It's a bit like when 2d objects, such as sheet of paper, are actually 3d, but the thickness of the paper is not apparent to anything on the surface.

Bradley Alan Nord

Okay... maybe it's just me but the essence of this story was much better when Francis Stevens (Gertrude Barrows Bennett) wrote her version as "Unseen Unfeared" in 1919.

Alison Scott

Dorothy L. Sayers uses this story as a frame for her mystery story, “The Image in the Mirror” — can be found on Project Gutenberg in “A Treasury of Sayers Stories.”

Mark Simmons

I love the old-school idea of a fourth spatial dimension! This comes up in the later volumes of the "Three-Body Problem" series, too - I'm very glad I read Edwin Abbott's "Flatland" before that, because I feel like I understood the idea much better when Abbott Abott explained it than when Wells and Liu Cixin did. In this case, though, it seems like we're also going with the idea of "another dimension" meaning a parallel world - like "From Beyond" or "Buckaroo Banzai." The mention of spooky moss also made me think of the Twilight in Sergei Lukyanenko's "Nightwatch" books. It was almost a bit of a disappointment that this weird otherworld is just a hangout spot for snooping ghosts. Thanks for another groovy vintage sci-fi journey!

Ori Kowarsky

Hey, if you’re jonsing for a story about a cat either teleported and/or lost in the 4th Dimension — it seems to be an itch that you just cannot scratch — you might want to check out “The Cat” by Gene Wolfe.

Oleh R

The mirror image effect was also used in “The Trap,” which was a Lovecraft revision with Whitehead. It was covered on the previous version of this show. It was only 13 years ago, how could you forget?

Ben A

Two utterly minor thoughts: Chad, didn’t you claim way back on your coverage of The Night Wire that you could simultaneously translate into Latin with your right hand and Greek with your left? I think you must have been channeling Lying Vincent Price, or a recent chemistry accident robbed you of your ambidextrousness. 😉 Also, on a somewhat more relevant note, there is a real condition in people called situs inversus totalis, where all the organs of the thorax and abdomen are reversed (as opposed to situs inversus thoracis, which only affects organs of the thorax). The cause stems not from travel to another dimension, but from incorrect signaling for cell migration during very early embryonic development, when the planes of the body are established. In over 20 years in the gross anatomy lab, I’ve never seen either condition, but I have friends who have. We don’t really have a good handle on how common it is, as people with the totalis version of the condition live perfectly normal lives and may never know about their organ reversal. Perhaps Wells had read about this and got inspired?

Devin Morse

This story somewhat reminded me of the horror film Carnival of Souls (1962). The protagonist occasionally passes out of the physical world, such that she can see other people but they can’t see or hear her. It’s a really unnerving effect.

Michael Cunliffe

With HG Wells back in the show, I have to wonder if Dandelou and the experimental cat from The Invisible Man have a support group..

Jim Cannon

Perhaps I have played too much Dungeons & Dragons, but it sure seemed to me like Plattner had blown himself into the Ethereal Plane.

nils hedglin

I read this story in Dangerous Dimensions from the British Library Tales of the Weird series. It collects weird/horror story of a physics/mathematical bent. Would recommend it if you're looking for something similar

HRPrice

Oh, we covered a hypothetical fourth dimension of space in my metaphysics class back in college! I’ll trot out the explanation that made the most sense to me. Even if you don’t want me to. You can’t stop me I’ve been waiting for this moment for SO LONG. Imagine you have paper cut outs of three letters: p, d, and b. Imagine also that they are the same size and in a very nice sans serif font, very consistent. If you take the p, and rotate it flat on the table, you can make it into a d. You can then pick it up and stack it on the d perfectly. They’re the same shape, just oriented differently. Not so the b. No matter how you rotate it, it can’t be stacked on the others: it’s a mirror of d and p. Instead, you have to pick it up and flip it, rotating the letter through the third dimension instead of the second. Now it’s the same as the d and the p, and can be stacked on them. In two dimensions, they’re mirror shapes, but in three? They are identical shapes. Now: Compare two hands, right and left. No matter how you twist or flip them, you can’t make them the same shape. They are three-dimensional mirrors of each other. But… if there was a fourth dimension of space… if we could ‘flip’ a hand through that… would they prove to be the same shape after all? Mirrors in 3 dimensions, identical in 4? Dun dun duuuun!

Alex Liggett

All I could think of during all the discussion of the fourth dimension was that bit in the Simpsons Treehouse of Horror episode where Professor Frink explains the hypothetical 'third dimension', in which a normal square is extended into a cube, or 'Frinkahedron'. Plattner's experience was indeed 'like something out of that twilight-y show about that zone'.

Stephen Hampshire

The backwards-making 4th dimension really reminded me of Zelazny’s “Doorways in the sand”, which I read into pieces when I was a kid.

Joe Hodgson

Just wanted to say, I’m from Leeds in the UK, I’m currently over in Moncton, New Brunswick. I met a fellow strange studies subscriber at a movie night last night! Instant new Boon companions

Austin Tero

This episode hit a bit close to home as an ESL teacher who has been unwillingly teaching environmental science since October. There’s been many a night learning what I’m required to teach the next day. I’ve been thankful that my students have withheld any deep questions. Although I suspect the real reason for this is that they’ve figured out I have no clue what I’m doing.

Anne Ominous

Found this one a bit hard to read also - glad I wasn't the only one. Terrific twilight world concept If only I had some of that powder... Free Dandelo !

Eric - Speaker in Digressions

Plattner appearing to people during the days he was missing made me think of Captain Kirk popping up every so often in "The Tholian Web." (Other Star Trek comes to mind, too -- Geordi and Ro being out of phase, for example.) Also, of course, one thinks of Stranger Things, various spirit worlds in the World of Darkness, &c.

Eric - Speaker in Digressions

Oh, and: I'm waiting for the kids to start taking the "H.G. Wells sit in a dark room until you see the green hills" TikTok challenge.

Trond Helstrup Poulsen

I always find that if they’d only called it “a” fourth dimension, they’d be in the clear. But no, they talk about THE fourth dimension and make a fool of themselves 😅 If you didn’t read the Arthur C. Clarke one, “Technical Error” from 1950 is a bit more polished and has a great part about how a man inverted through the fourth dimension might take nourishment from non-inverted food stuffs. It’s an excellent read. And the conclusion is a great one.

Ratchbox

I LOVE the Madballs side tangent! Those guys were awesome!

James Anthony

Reminds me a bit of a short story I once read called The Moebius Strip, where a stripper at a party for mathematicians accidentally tuns her body into a surface with only one side and disappears into the fourth dimension. One of the attending mathematicians figures out what happed, does the same thing to himself, finds her, and gets them both safely home. When asked how dangerous it could possibly have been, he points out that if they'd done the wrong thing they might have reentered our world inside out

James Anthony

When I heard the description of seeing both worlds I was a bit confused why his explanation was phosphorescence rather than a two way mirror. Those had existed for nearly a century at that point and are a better description of his experience than phosphorescence anyway