In Mathematicians in Love I’m working on a scene were my characters surf through a tunnel to a parallel sheet of space.

I first thought about how to do this in Chapter Eight of my 1984 book, The Fourth Dimension. The traditional way for connecting two parallel sheets of space is to imagine a hump that bulges out from one space and merges into the other space as shown in the figure below, which was drawn from one of my sketches by David Povilaitis. This kind of connection is traditionally known as an Einstein-Rosen bridge or a wormhole.

In this scene, by the way, we see the traditional Edwin Abbott Flatland hero A Square about to sneak off into the parallel world of Globland with a married Flatlander woman Una, whom he hopes to seduce. Note that “A” is not an abbreviation, it’s his full first name. (The science writer Ian Stewart recently published an interesting Annotated Flatland as well.)

Although we often think of Flatland as being a two-dimensional world like a table-top, we can also imagine, with Charles Howard Hinton and Kee Dewdney, a 2D world that’s turned upon its edge — like a cross-sectional slice of our planet.

By the way, I once edited a collection of Hinton’s writings called Speculations on the Fourth Dimension which is now out of print, but available used, or (in part) online.

In the Hinton/Dewdney-style 2D world we have a notion of up/down matching the familiar one. In my 2002 novel Spaceland I used this kind of image.

In this picture we see a couple of Flatlanders at a hot-dog stand. They’re drawn with some internal detail instead of just as, like, lines and squares with eyes. Those bumps on the roof are Flatland writing.

Now we get to the new image for today.

This is a three-in-one picture:

(1) A Square on a surfboard in a 2D world, riding a wave towards the shore.

(2) A couple of sketches of an Einstein-Rosen bridge between two parallel universes, and in one of them I’ve drawn in water and air for the two worlds. The water sloshes right through the tunnel.

(3) A Square surfs into one end of an Einstein-Rosen bridge and comes out the other end — now facing away from the shore.

Before drawing this picture I hadn’t realized that the passage through the hypertunnel would turn my surfers away from the shore. That’s why I love math and logic. You set up the system, turn the crank, and, if you’re lucky, you learn something new. It’s like logic is a complicated feeler that we use to reach out and touch invisible part of the mental world. As Kurt G�del once told me, “The a priori is very powerful.”

Today we went to Elena’s funeral at the Mount Madonna Center. It was a Vedic ceremony, very nice, very profound. When my time comes, I hope that, like Elena, I’m buried somewhere far from the sound of cars.

I was struck by a sculpture of the holy word Om or Aum on the grounds. I asked about it and was told that that the three parts of the symbol stand for three sounds, that is, the big part like a 3 is the A; the wavy part on the right is the U, and the bowl with the sphere on the top is the M. Aum is, like, the sound that started up the whole universe. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was Aum.

AAAAUUUUUUMMMMMMMMMMMMMMmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

We went on a couple of walks over the weekend, one was Sanborn Park off Black Road near Saratoga, the other was in the Wilder Ranch Open Space above Four Mile Beach on Route One near Santa Cruz.

Green mossy gnarl.

The fabled banana slug. Note the tiny black eye-dot in the eyestalk.

“Hi, I’ve traveled here from La Hampa to help you.”

I got into this idea that you could take a series of pictures where the frame is horizontally divided into two.

The bumps on the lip of a waterfall obey a gnarly class-four cellular automaton rule.

There’s always something uplifting about a cloud sitting on the crest of an upsloping hill.

On the Wilder hike I came across a really big lizard. I was so close to him that he froze, and I had time to get several pictures of him. Love those scales, love the colors.

Who says dinosaurs are extinct?

You see a lot of this particular kind of beetle on the hills by the ocean in Cruz. Very sleek.

I took along the most recent couple of pages of my Mathematicians in Love manscript.

One more Gaian ambassador appeared, a tiny snake sunning herself.

Back to the Union cafe in Cruz, got a blurred photo of hippie dreads.

Some readers report that Bruce Sterling linked to my jellyfish pictures. He and I wrote a story about flying jellyfish called “Big Jelly” about ten years back. Here’s a picture of Bruce, Richard Kadrey, and Rudy Jr. on my back porch taken in that era. Three bad dudes.

My sphere-artist friend Dick Termes has gotten into 3D drawings with the help of his friend Larry Lohrman. You click and drag to look around inside the image. This is a lot like the vlog interface I’ve been talking about on my blog. It seems there’s a whole new QuickTime Virtual Reality technlogy growing up.

There’s out there, and there’s waaaay out there. MatheMagician Jeff Hrdlicka sent me a link to a novel called Journey To The Great Central Sun by a fellow who says he’s enjoyed some quality time with aliens.

Juxtapoz artist and hotrod fiend COOP has a cool blog. I wonder if he can get me a 1972 Gran Torino wagon with the small block V-8 351 Cleveland engine like in this next scene.

I'm talking about the scene I wrote yesterday with the Gran Torino, Bixby Bridge and Rowena the flying alien cone shell. Bela, Paul and Alma are speeding south on Route 1 in Big Sur on their way to hampajump at Pfeiffer Beach, pursued by some bad guys in an Audi, the minions of Congressman Van Veeter, who wants to take away their hypertunnel-making paracomputer.

***

The road was pretty straight and I was going a hundred. The Audi was well behind us. But my suspension and alignment weren’t the best, which meant that the view out the front window was a blur. We came up on a pair of camper vans like they were standing still. I fishtailed around them in one smooth motion, getting back into our lane just ahead of an on-coming line of cars.

“Sweet,” said Alma, looking back. “I have an idea. There’s this gravel road that loops inland just before the Bixby Bridge. The bridge is only about a mile ahead. It’s the Coast Road you want; it branches off the left; it’s cut into a tall embankment. We’ve got such a big lead now that you can whip into the Coast Road and Veeter’s guys won’t even see. They’ll drive past. And then we take the Coast Road down about ten miles, and while we’re doing that, they give up and go home.”

“They’ll just wait at Pfeiffer Beach,” said Paul. “Slow down. We’re gonna crash.”

“I don’t think we ever said Pfeiffer Beach on the phone,” said Alma. “Get ready to turn left, Bela.” I was up to a hundred and ten.

I slowed down, but not all that much. The main road was a little sandy, and the Coast Road was gravel, so I figured I could do a controlled drift for my turn. I’d slide sideways into the pocket. The trick would be to start the turn early.

I think I would have made it if it hadn’t have been for the two bicyclists. They came wobbling out of Coast Road about a quarter second after I entered my drift some two hundred feet north of the actual turn. If I kept going, the car’s right side would swat them like gnats. So I tried to bail, giving the car a bit more power, and twisting the wheel back to the right.

But I overcompensated. Error. My overpowered squinty whale shot through the guard rail to the right of the bridge, and out into the achingly beautiful gorge where Bixby Creek meets the Pacific.

Time went very slow. I looked at Alma, at Paul, and at Alma again.

“Bela,” she said. “Bela.” I took her hand.

We were in free-flight, right at the high point of our arc. Slowly the squinty whale began tipping forward, following the weight of the big engine. The aquamarine and ink-blue water was so exquisitely shaded, the traceries of white foam so delicate. My last sight.

But then something thudded against the car’s roof with a resonant splat. The car shuddered, swayed, and began to rise, slowly and then faster. I myself felt lighter — I was bobbling on the seat.

“Rowena!” shouted Paul. Alma and I began to cheer.

Yes. Rowena the flying alien cone shell snail had fastened her great foot onto us! Her eyestalks bent down to peer in at us through the windshield. We waved and cheered some more. Our arms flew about like crazy rags; Alma’s medallion danced in the air. Rowena had some kind of antigravity thing happening for us. Her red-and-white-striped mouth tube curved around to poke into my window.

“You point Pfeiffer Beach,” she said. We leveled out at maybe a thousand feet and followed the Big Sur coast south.