Scientific Romances

Scientific Romances by C. H. Hinton is a daring collection of philosophical tales and speculative essays first published in London in 1886, where mathematics, metaphysics, and visionary fiction meet. From What is the Fourth Dimension? to A Plane World, The Persian King, A Picture of Our Universe, Casting Out the Self, Exhaustive Account, and The Æther, the volume ranges across hidden realities, cosmic order, and the limits of human perception. It begins by warning that progress in one field can become dangerous without deeper theory in others, then leads readers into vivid thought experiments about one-dimensional, two-dimensional, and four-dimensional existence. Using numbers, cubes, atoms, and mirror images, Hinton asks what can truly be known of matter, arrangement, and selfhood. The result is a provocative meditation on space, identity, and reality itself, inviting readers to imagine worlds beyond ordinary experience and to question whether the universe is as fixed, visible, and objective as it seems. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.