space



I learned about Edward Abbott’s 1884 novella about entities in the two-dimensional world from this video. The book is entitled “Flatland: a Romance of Many Dimensions” and is so eccentric I couldn’t imagine how the Victorian era received it. The video features Carl Sagan trying to explain how a person in a two-dimensional world can perceive an intruding entity with three dimensions. The book also talks about how one flatlander journeyed to space and was branded a madman when he returned to Flatland to report what he had seen about other dimensions. Flatland’s relationship to ours is, of course, the same as our relationship to the four-dimensional realm.