Houghton EC85 Ab264 884f - Flatland%2C cover.
(Image by Wikipedia (commons.wikimedia.org), Author: Edwin Abbott Abbott (author)) Details Source DMCA
"I call our world Flatland, not because we call it so, but to make its nature clearer to you, my happy readers, who are privileged to live in Space.
"Imagine a vast sheet of paper on which straight Lines, Triangles, Squares, Pentagons, Hexagons, and other figures, instead of remaining fixed in their places, move freely about, on or in the surface, but without the power of rising above or sinking below it, very much like shadows--only hard and with luminous edges--and you will then have a pretty correct notion of my country and countrymen.
"Alas, a few years ago, I should have said 'my universe': but now my mind has been opened to higher views of things."
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"When I could find [my] voice I shrieked in agony, 'Either this is madness or it is Hell.'
'It is neither,' calmly replied the voice of the sphere, 'it is Knowledge; it is Three Dimensions: open your eye once again and try to look steadily..."
**
In 1884 the headmaster of the City of London School, the Reverend Edwin Abbott, wrote a unique, prescient, delightfully amusing book, titled Flatland. The book anticipated some of the developments in theoretical physics and revealed an astute psychological intuition.
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"Flatland is narrated by an inhabitant of a two-dimensional world - a world that has length and breadth but no depth or height. (Imagine a piece of paper that has no dimension above or below its flat surface). The beings who inhabit this world are lines, squares, triangles, hexagons, etc. They move on the surface, but are unable to rise above or sink below that plane. Naturally, they are unaware of a third dimension; height is unimaginable to them.
"The narrator, a square, has a mind-shattering experience, A strange visitor arrives from the third dimension, which he calls 'space-land.'
"The visitor tries to impart what three-dimensional reality is like and how limited Flatland is by comparison. He defines himself as a Circle of circles, called a Sphere is Spaceland.
"This, of course, the Square cannot grasp, for all he sees of his visitor is a circle - but a circle with the most disturbing, unexplainable properties: it waxes and wanes in diameter, occasionally shrinking to a mere point and disappearing altogether.
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