Fig. 8 (136).
We can think of this turning as a turning of the face ABCD about AB, and a turning of each section parallel to ABCD round the vertical line in which it intersects the face ABEF, the space in which the turning takes place being a different one from that in which the cube lies.
One of the conditions, then, of our inquiry in the direction of the infinitely small is that we form the conception of a rotation about a plane. The production of a body in a state in which it presents the appearance of a looking-glass image of its former state is the criterion for a four-dimensional rotation.
There is some evidence for the occurrence of such transformations of bodies in the change of bodies from those which produce a right-handed polarisation of light to those which produce a left-handed polarisation; but this is not a point to which any very great importance can be attached.
Still, in this connection, let me quote a remark from Prof. John G. McKendrick’s address on Physiology before the British Association at Glasgow. Discussing the possibility of the hereditary production of characteristics through the material structure of the ovum, he estimates that in it there exist 12,000,000,000 biophors, or ultimate particles of living matter, a sufficient number to account for hereditary transmission, and observes: “Thus it is conceivable that vital activities may also be determined by the kind of motion that takes place in the molecules of that which we speak of as living matter. It may be different in kind from some of the motions known to physicists, and it is conceivable that life may be the transmission to dead matter, the molecules of which have already a special kind of motion, of a form of motion sui generis.”
Now, in the realm of organic beings symmetrical structures—those with a right and left symmetry—are everywhere in evidence. Granted that four dimensions exist, the simplest turning produces the image form, and by a folding-over structures could be produced, duplicated right and left, just as is the case of symmetry in a plane.
Thus one very general characteristic of the forms of organisms could be accounted for by the supposition that a four-dimensional motion was involved in the process of life.
But whether four-dimensional motions correspond in other respects to the physiologist’s demand for a special kind of motion, or not, I do not know. Our business is with the evidence for their existence in physics. For this purpose it is necessary to examine into the significance of rotation round a plane in the case of extensible and of fluid matter.
Let us dwell a moment longer on the rotation of a rigid body. Looking at the cube in [fig. 3], which turns about the face of ABFE, we see that any line in the face can take the place of the vertical and horizontal lines we have examined. Take the diagonal line AF and the section through it to GH. The portions of matter which were on one side of AF in this section in [fig. 3] are on the opposite side of it in [fig. 8]. They have gone round the line AF. Thus the rotation round a face can be considered as a number of rotations of sections round parallel lines in it.