ABSTRACT
‘[P]opularisations are addressed not only to the general public, but to other researchers in related areas’. 1 This is illustrated by J. B. S. Haldane’s interest in, and knowledge of, physics, which indicates that he may well have read popular science books on the topic. In his essay, ‘Possible Worlds’, Haldane remembers convincing himself of ‘Euclid’s or any equivalent parallel postulate’ by imagining himself ‘into a “Riemann’s” or elliptical space, in which all coplanar lines meet once’:
I was standing on a transparent plane. I could see it as I looked down. If I looked up I saw the other side of it, and through it the soles of my boots, pointing backwards. By looking round I could see every point on the plane, and most of them from both sides.
(261)