A Paradoxical Ode

(A poem about higher dimensionality!)


My soul is an entangled knot,
Upon a liquid vortex wrought
By Intellect, in the Unseen residing,
And thine cloth like a convict sit,
With marlinspike untwisting it,
Only to find its knottiness abiding;
Since all the tools for its untying
In four-dimensional space are lying
Wherein thy fancy intersperses
Long avenues of universes,
While Klein and Clifford fill the void
With one finite, unbounded homaloid,
And think the Infinite is now at last destroyed.

- By James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879), discoverer of the equations governing electromagnetic fields, the greatest physicist between Newton and Einstein, and amateur poet.