Flatland: Romance of Many Dimensions

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Roberts Brothers, 1885 - Fourth dimension - 155 pages
In a two-dimensional universe populated by a hierarchical society of geometric figures, a square is persecuted for attempting to reveal its new knowledge of a third dimension, learned from encounters with a sphere.
 

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Contents

II
11
III
14
IV
18
V
23
VI
39
VII
48
VIII
53
IX
57
XIII
83
XIV
85
XV
93
XVI
101
XVII
107
XVIII
118
XIX
122
XX
130

X
64
XI
70
XII
75
XXI
140
XXII
144
XXIII
149

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Page 11 - 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...
Page 109 - My Lord means seemingly that it is Northward and Southward. Stranger. I mean nothing of the kind. I mean a direction in which you cannot look, because you have no eye in your side.
Page 98 - World. Out of your Space. For your Space is not the true Space. True Space is a Plane; but your Space is only a Line. KING If you cannot indicate this motion from left to right by yourself moving in it, then I beg you to describe it to me in words, i...
Page 16 - I, the sole possessor of the truths of Space and of the theory of the introduction of Light from the world of Three Dimensions — as if I were the maddest of the mad! But a truce to these painful digressions: let me return to our houses. The most common form for the construction of a house is five-sided or pentagonal, as in the annexed figure. The two Northern sides RO, OF, constitute the roof, and for the most part have no doors; on the East is a small door for the Women; on the West a much larger...
Page 154 - Yet I exist in the hope that these memoirs, in some manner, I know not how, may find their way to the minds of humanity in Some Dimension, and may stir up a race of rebels who shall refuse to be confined to limited Dimensionality.
Page 98 - Well, yes. Out of your World. Out of your Space. For your Space is not the true Space. True Space is a Plane; but your Space is only a Line. King. If you cannot indicate this motion from left to right by yourself moving in it, then I beg you to describe it to me in words.
Page 115 - ... method of Analogy." Then followed a still longer silence, after which he continued our dialogue. Sphere. Tell me, Mr. Mathematician; if a Point moves Northward, and leaves a luminous wake, what name would you give to the wake? /. A straight Line. Sphere. And a straight Line has how many extremities? /. Two. Sphere. Now conceive the Northward straight Line moving parallel to itself, East and West, so that every point in it leaves behind it the wake of a straight Line. What name will you give to...
Page 138 - And once there, shall we stay our upward course? In that blessed region of Four Dimensions, shall we linger on the threshold of the Fifth, and not enter therein? Ah, no ! Let us rather resolve that our ambition shall soar with our corporal ascent. Then, yielding to our intellectual onset, the gates of the Sixth Dimension shall fly open ; after that a Seventh, and then an Eighth — How long I should have continued I know not.
Page 109 - Southward. Stranger. I mean nothing of the kind. I mean a direction in which you cannot look, because you have no eye in your side. /. Pardon me, my Lord, a moment's inspection will convince your Lordship that I have a perfect luminary at the juncture of two of my sides. Stranger. Yes: but in order to see into Space you ought to have an eye, not on your Perimeter, but on your side, that is, on what you would probably call your inside; but we in Spaceland should call it your side.
Page 148 - Northward,' for that would be such nonsense, you know. How could a thing move Upward, and not Northward? Upward and not Northward! Even if I were a baby, I could not be so absurd as that. How silly it is! Ha! ha! ha!

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