Flatland

Edwin Abbott Abbott's satirical 1884 novella Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, is "on the surface" an examination of multiple dimensions. Its author, writing anonymously as "A Square" takes us on a fantastical trip to a completely flat, two-dimensional world whose inhabitants are geometric shapes. These shapes think that the "planar" world of length and width are all that exist, until one shape discovers the existence of a third physical dimension, which ultimately is expanded to the concept of a fourth. As a given shape, one's class and intelligence is determined by one's number of sides. Men are depicted as polygonal, while women are straight lines (now hang on a minute!)... Flatland illustrates marvelously the difficulty a person or group might have seeing a greater reality, or different reality, than its own. In this world of "plane geometry" with "Euclidian Geometric" shapes, each dimension can only perceive the one below it - so if one has evidence of a third, what about a fourth?