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Disorders of Orientation in Space-Time

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2018

William Gooddy
William Gooddy*
Affiliation:
The National Hospital, Queen Square, London, W.C. 1
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Extract

“The non-mathematician is seized by a mysterious shuddering when he hears of ‘four-dimensional’ things, by a feeling not unlike that awakened by thoughts of the occult. And yet there is no more commonplace statement than that the world in which we live is a four-dimensional space-time continuum. By this we mean that it is possible to describe the position of a point at rest by means of three numbers (co-ordinates) x, y, z, and that there is an indefinite number of points in the neighbourhood of this one, the position of which can be described by co-ordinates such as x1, y1, z1, which may be as near as we choose to the respective values of the co-ordinates x, y, z of the first point. In virtue of the latter property we speak of a ‘continuum’, and owing to the fact that there are three co-ordinates we speak of it as being ‘three-dimensional’.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal of Psychiatry , Volume 112 , Issue 488 , July 1966 , pp. 661 - 670
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1966 

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