Objects of personal utility reflect the culture and technology of their time — such as luggage, which has evolved along with modes of human transportation. In certain extreme circumstances — World War II, or a 19th-century scientific expedition to Antarctica — a mere suitcase can become the definitive biography of its owner.

One of the more disturbingly fascinating collections of trunks, left behind by mentally ill patients who passed away at the Willard Institute for the Chronic Insane from the 1910s onward, has been documented by photographer Jon Crispin. In an interview with Hunter Oatman-Stanford, he mentions Dmytre: “He was Ukrainian and clearly brilliant. He had notebooks filled with drawings of sine waves and mathematical things like that. There’s a wedding picture of Dmytre and his wife, and she’s holding a bouquet of fake flowers, which were also in the case. Dmytre was interesting because he got arrested by the Secret Service. He went to Washington DC and said that he was actually married to President Truman’s daughter, Margaret Truman.”

Consider the bags packed by Jews under the Nazi regime who believed they were merely being relocated (while being sent to the gas chambers in Auschwitz), or soldiers who concealed radio equipment during World War II (sometimes dropped from an airplane with a parachute). Both the victims and perpetrators in this case had to optimise the things they could carry; the former measured by intimacy, the latter by brute efficiency — and both through necessity.

Things hidden inside secret compartments could be, according to TH Ormsbee, “(...) for money, securities, ancestral jewellery and silver plate, a missing will, or a carefully written confession of a crime committed years before (...)”, and featured in countless tales of theft and espionage.

Apart from the technologies that enable the carrying of luggage (balanced shoulder straps, buckles or wheels), the task of packing a suitcase can enter a mathematical domain. The rucksack problem is defined as follows (Wikipedia): “Given a set of items, each with a weight and a value, determine the number of each item to include in a collection so that the total weight is less than or equal to a given limit and the total value is as large as possible.” Furthermore, in practical terms — the sequence of putting things inside a briefcase becomes important, since they can only be taken out in roughly the reverse order.

Japanese burr puzzles are enclosures that are mechanical locks themselves, inside which a secret object or document can be hidden — to be opened only by those intelligent enough to solve it. The Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős (1913-96) lived out of a suitcase, famously, and travelled the world solving problems in areas such as discrete mathematics. Appropriately enough, this field includes the optimum packing of suitcases, or taking the shortest possible path through several cities without revisiting any city (this is also known as “the travelling salesman problem”).

There are some striking parallels between the two distinct problems of packing matter (such as oranges or cannonballs) and packing information (such as data compression techniques in computer science).

As far back as 1587, Sir Walter Raleigh and Thomas Harriot had explored the question of stacking cannonballs aboard a ship, which was revisited by Johannes Kepler and Carl Friedrich Gauss in the form of grocers stacking maximally packed oranges, in order to leave as little empty space between them as possible. This antiquated problem about three-dimensional space was finally solved with the help of a computer by mathematician TC Hales in 1998.

Astronomer David Darling notes, “Harriot was an atomist in the classical Greek sense, and believed that understanding how spheres pack together was crucial to understanding how the basic constituents of nature are arranged.” This would lead to a better understanding of the structure of solid matter — such as the crystalline packings observed inside diamonds, graphite and snowflakes.

Spheres can be generalised to higher dimensions than three, and studied by the geometric arrangement of their centres, known as a lattice. In eight dimensions, the densest packing is called E8, a fact proven by Maryna Viazovska in 2016. This obscure object may underlie some of the fundamental physics now being explored through string theory.

A related structure, known as the Leech lattice (in the form of Golay error-correcting codes), was employed in NASA’s deep-space network to transmit colour images of Jupiter and Saturn taken by the probes Voyager 1 and Voyager 2.

When an alien civilisation chances upon these intergalactic suitcases crammed with our most cutting-edge science, music and intimate desires — these tell-tale objects will narrate the history and convey the brink of destruction at which humanity now stands poised.

Rohit Gupta explores the history of science as Compasswallah; @fadesingh