Date: 2014-12-12
To: Flatland Intro
Miles today: 0.0
Weather: clear sky

Several occurrences have happened to me recently to inspire me to write about some of my thoughts on reality, especially understanding a four dimensional universe. Linda and I went to see ¢Intersteller¢ a few weeks ago. I had fun discussing the movie with our nephew and his wife over Thanksgiving and taking the thought process further. And some other occasion which I now can¢t recall!So here we go! Hope you have fun with the ideas - I certainly do! :-)Before I get into writing about 4 dimensional space, let me share with you some background on my interest in out-of-the-box thinking. I don¢t remember when I first started thinking about these things. I do remember that as a boy I read a lot of science fiction (along with Freddy the Pig and Doctor Doolittle). I was good in math and science, and was also good at grammar. I loved to diagram sentences! Back then, we didn¢t have gifted or advanced placement classes, but schools did often assign students to classes based on how good their grades were. When I started high school, they put me in some advanced classes, including English.When I was a sophomore, our English teacher told us we had learned grammar well enough and would not be covering that any more. Oh no! Instead we would focus on literature. Oh no! Here I was in a class with all these literature brainiacs and all I read was science fiction, and slowly at that!One day our teacher gave us an assignment to give a speech on a topic of our choice. My topic was weird concepts of reality. I remember listing several alternate concepts of reality such as:--We¢re really just dreaming, perhaps we¢re even still in the womb.--We¢re just part of someone else¢s dream.--We¢re part of some behavioral scientist¢s experiment and there¢s no reality outside of our own perception. The other people we encounter are actors and the scenes we are in are just on a stage (I later saw a TV show, perhaps Twilight Zone, with this theme.)--Our brains are just floating in a large beaker with wires hooked up to our nervous system. What we perceive as reality is just electrical signals being fed to our brains by a computer program that make us think we¢re seeing, touching, hearing, smelling and tasting some false reality. (The movie ¢Matrix¢ has this theme.)After my talk, several of the well-read students said they enjoyed it and asked me where I had read about those ideas. I truthfully said I just thought them up, but I¢m sure the background for my thoughts was all the science fiction I had read!Now on to 4 dimensional space! The way I like to think about 4 dimensional space is to first think about our 3 dimensional world as a 2 dimensional world. Then imagine what a 3 dimensional creature could do with our 2 dimensional world and try to correlate that with what a 4 dimensional creature could do with our 3 dimensional world. Say What?!I mentioned in one of my earlier posts about using the book ¢Flatland¢ by A. Square (Edwin Abbott) as a good starting point. Flatland is a two dimensional world inhabited by people who are triangles, squares, circles, etc. who have no third dimension, and are not aware that a third dimension exists. You can download the pdf online from various sites. Here¢s one place you can read it free online: gutenberg.org/ebooks/201.You can also buy the book for a pittance - on Amazon, it¢s 3 bucks for a hardcopy or one buck for a Kindle edition.Abbott published the book in 1884 and takes the opportunity to make his book a satire on society in Victorian England as well as a story about multi-dimensional space. Wikipedia does a good summary of it. If you¢re not interested in the satire or the background explanation on how two dimensional people can see, skip Part I and start with Part II which is the story line.I also recommend ¢Flatland, the Movie.¢ It¢s is a 35 minute animated film that does a great job with the storyline and eliminates the subservient role of women satirized in Abbott¢s book. Martin Sheen did A. Square¢s voice. I just noticed that Tony Hale did the voice of the King of Pointland - Tony is a good friend of our daughter and son-in-law. There¢s also a 1:40 animated movie ¢Flatland, the Film¢ that I haven¢t watched yet that¢s on YouTube. I¢ve put the book ¢Sphereland¢ and the movie ¢Flatland2: Sphereland¢ on my Christmas wish list!We¢ve got guests coming this afternoon for the weekend, so I¢ll develop my thoughts in my next post, hopefully early next week. PS I did OK in my English classes, although for some reason they continued to put me in the advanced English classes with my literature brainiac friends. I struggled, but enjoyed learning from them as well as from the teachers. Since my teachers wouldn¢t let me do book reports on just science fiction books, I became pretty good at writing ¢B¢ book reports on books I hadn¢t fully read and giving ¢C¢ oral book reports. I think my overall grade each year was a ¢C¢ even though I got an ¢F¢ on the final my senior year! I did have a couple of poems I had to write published in our school literary magazine - they were, of course, on science fiction themes¢¦