Hannah’s Reviews > Flatland > Status Update

I’m 1892, “Karl Pearson hypothesized that matter might result from ether (the unseen medium that 19th century physicists posited to explain action at a distance like gravitation) squirting into our world from the fourth dimension. Hinton speculated on the way the fourth dimension could explain physical phenomenon like light (a manifestation of vibration in an unseen dimension) and static electricity (the…

I want to try to find the “mind-destroying” computer graphic program that mathematician Thomas Banchoff made that can project images of how higher dimensional objects would appear as they rotate through lower dimensional space.

… one whit the better morally or spiritually’ (Abbott); only the practice of faith, hope, and love can make us better people.”

“In European visual art… artists like Picasso and Braque attempted to transcend Renaissance perspectival conventions by portraying multiple dimensions simultaneously.”

Philosophers in the 1870s “attempted to justify Christian belief in God and immortality by imagining a continuity between our visible universe and a spiritual one in the the fourth dimension. Physicist James Clerk Maxwell imagined his soul as a trefoil knot that could be untied only in the fourth dimension.”
Even if we could actually conceive of a fourth dimension, ‘we would not be one whit better’ (Abbott).

“Biblical accounts of miracles thus had the same status as early scientific theories: both represented the attempts of earlier cultures to explain illusions in terms they could understand….
For Abbott, the glory of Christianity was that the constant challenge of illusion had kept faith from degrading into a new enslavement to law.”

“By positing imagination as the basis of all knowledge, Abbott sanctioned a religion independent of material proof: there was no need to require violations of physical laws in order to believe in the higher, spiritual truths of Christianity. [God’s] manifestations of himself in human history were never more than ‘refractions’ of an immaterial reality…”

“Abbott stress that faith worked in the same way as science: just as we could believe in scientific concept because they worked, not because we could prove them, we could as confidently believe in religious concepts as long as these worked to make us better people.”

“Just as 2/3 of the suns rays were not visible to the naked eye there might exist vast riches of knowledge requiring only the development of proper intellectual organs to perceive them.”

“Conveniently for the Flatland status quo, any progress towards respectable, equilateral status that a lower-class isosceles could hope for was contingent upon behavior that served the state (like success through military service) or that reinforce conformity and thus social stability, like hard work, frugality, and self-control.”

From the introduction by Rosemary Jann:

“Only as a result of having to experience alternative mores does he come eventually to acknowledge the illogic and inhumanity of views he considered natural before.”