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In Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time, did Mr. Murry (Meg's father) use a device, a body motion, or only his mind to tesser? Did the non-earthlings tesser by the same means? Is such a detail given?

I'm not asking about the bug-on-fabric analogy. I haven't read the story in decades, and I can't recall nor find an answer online.

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In A Wrinkle in Time it appears that tessering is done with the mind. It is not explicitly stated.

However:

  1. When Mrs. Which is about to take Meg back to Camazotz, Mrs. Whatsit says of Mr. Murry's tessering, "At the moment he still treats tessering as though he were working with a machine". (Emphasis mine). So, he is clearly not working with a machine.

  2. He did not use the glasses to tesser, though they had some influence on the results. On the Aunt Beast planet, Mr. Murry tells Meg that, "Our friends here feel that it was only the fact that I still wore the glasses ... that kept me within this solar system".

  3. When Mr. Murry describes to Calvin the initial tessering attempts, he explains that he was the second. About the first person, Hank: Mr. Murry says that they saw him vanish. "He was there and then he wasn't". There is no explanation of how they did this. There was evidently no large piece of equipment, as they expected to return and Mr. Murry did not have any equipment with him (at least, he had been imprisoned there for a long time and did not appear to have anything with him).

  4. Mr. Murry also mentions to Calvin that "there was no way to try it out ahead with rats or monkeys or dogs". So they weren't just sending the person via some kind of transporter machine.

I did not find any further discussion of how it is done.

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I've been through A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door, A Swiftly Tilting Planet and Many Waters, and I can't find any discussion of the mechanism of tessering. Frequent mention is made of the Tesseract but this seems to be more of a concept than anything physical.

When Mr. Murry escapes from the column he doesn't need any equipment to do it. He does have Mrs. Who's glasses, but it isn't clear whether it's these that allow him to tesser or whether they just allow him to see where to tesser to. I assume it's the latter since he obviously didn't have the glasses when he first tessered out of the laboratory on Earth.

Mrs. Who, Which and Whatsit can tesser without any apparent equipment.

I suspect L'Engle was simply not interested in the hard Sci-Fi aspects of tessering and I don't think we'll get a definitive answer from the books. Unless there are interviews with L'Engle or similar out there in Googlespace I suspect there is no answer.

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    Equipment was used to transport the twins to Noah's time in Many Waters, though.
    – Hypnosifl
    Commented Sep 27, 2015 at 18:33
  • @Hypnosifl What sort of equipment, may I ask?
    – 5260452
    Commented May 31, 2018 at 4:30
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    @jtheletter: all the books says is that in the far corner of the lab where there was a not-quite-ordinary-looking computer. The boys type take me someplace warm on it, then when they open the kitchen door they find themselves in ancient Palestine. As usual L'Engle simply isn't interested in the mechanics.
    – John Rennie
    Commented May 31, 2018 at 10:16
  • You mention (about Mrs. Who's glasses), " but it isn't clear whether it's these that allow him to tesser or whether they just allow him to see where to tesser to" -- actually it is mentioned in the book that they remained within that solar system because he was wearing the glasses. Not that he actually used them but that they somehow protected him.
    – Basya
    Commented Aug 28, 2022 at 11:44
  • @JohnRennie - More likely ancient Canaan. Of course, the Biblical flood narrative is not consistent with archeological and geological evidence, but it certainly was conceived of as taking place thousands of years before its synthesis. Terms cognate to "Palestine" date from around 1100 BCE, whereas terms cognate to "Canaan" date from around 1800 BCE or perhaps even 2500 BCE. Though note that the Biblical flood narrative is never explicitly mentioned as taking place in the region that was (or would be) Canaan. Perhaps people believed it occurred in Ur or somewhere around there.
    – Adamant
    Commented Aug 28, 2022 at 17:39

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