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Posted
on 23-Mar-04 05:49 PM
The other dimensions
The protagonist of Edwin A. Abbott's Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions is a sqare, and the story is a first-person account of the square living in a two dimensional land – flatland. The other inhabitants of the flatland are lines, triangles, squares, pentagons and circles. Since they are living in a two dimensional space, and cannot view each other from a height, i.e. the third dimension, they appear to each other as lines. They discriminate one another's shape by moving around one another and touching and seeing how the lines change in their length.
The happy life of the square is interrupted by appearance of a sphere, who is intent on making the square realize the three-dimensional world that the sphere belongs to. The sphere appears nothing but a circle to the square, and above and below of the spheres are just forward and back for the square. Despite of continuous effort of the sphere, the square cannot comprehend another dimension. Only when the sphere lifts the square to three dimensional space – spaceland - does the square perceive another dimension. From the added extra dimension, the square can see shapes of his fellow inhabitants and, offcourse, their inside which he had never been able to realize before.
We are the square in the flatland. What we know about other persons, other creatures, the universe and, of course, the ultimate truth is limited because of the limited dimensions we can perceive. Like the square, we are not able to see the inside of fellow humans, let alone the ultimate truth. Some spiritual gurus proclaim that they have perceived the world from another dimension as well. They give long and untiring lectures about the spritual world but to no avail, at least for me. Are they the spheres trying to lift 'we' the square in another dimension ? Or, are they just another square faking to know something which is even beyond their capacity ? How many more dimensions do we need to lift ourselves in order to realize the ultimate truth ? Or, is it even realizable ?
At the end, the protagonist of Edwin's novel, the square, thinks beyond the third dimension and mentions about the possibility of the fourth dimension, or even infinite dimensions for that matter. He then explains to the sphere about it; however, the 'short-sighted' sphere is not able to comprehend it.
(I read the old edition of the novel in my early college days, and almost forgot it immediately. The above excerpt of the novel is brief summary after reading reviews of the book in the web. Had it not been for the string theory, I would have almost forgotten it.)
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