"Benford-FourthDimension" - читать интересную книгу автора (Benford Gregory)

perceive it as a whole. Some found such transports of the imagination inspiring,
while others thought them crass and far too literal. I am unaware of Abbott
himself ever subscribing to such beliefs.

Still, Abbott and his adventure-some Square longed for the strange. More than
any other writer, Abbott coined the literary currency of dimensional metaphor.
By having a point of view which is literally above it all, surveying the follies
of a two-dimensional plane, Abbott can adroitly satirize the staid rigidities of
his Victorian world. (Perhaps this is why he first published Flatland under a
pseudonym.)

"Irregulars" are cruelly executed, for example. Do they stand for foreigners?
Gypsies? Cripples? We are left to fill in some blanks, but the overall shape of
the plot is clear -- flights of fancy are punished, and A Square does not finish
happily.

At a deeper level, the book harks toward deep scientific issues, and the
difficulty of comprehending a physical reality beyond our immediate senses. This
is the great theme of modem physics. The worlds of relativity and the quantum
are beyond the rough-and-ready ideas we chimpanzees have built into us, from our
distant ancestors' experience at throwing stones and poking sticks on African
plains.

Still deeper, in this fanciful narrative the good Reverend tries to speak
indirectly of intense spiritual experience. The trip into the higher realm of
three dimensions is a fine metaphor for a mystical encounter.

The thrust of the deceptively simple narrative is to make us examine our basic
assumptions. After all, our visual perceptions of the world are two-dimensional
patterns, yet we somehow know how to see three-dimensionality. One knows
instantly the difference between a ball and a fiat disk by their shading in
available light. Objects move in front of each other, like a woman walking by a
wall. We automatically discount a possible interpretation -- that the woman has
somehow dissolved the wall for an instant as she passes. Instead, we see her in
her three-dimensionality. The eye has learned the world's geometry and discards
any other scheme.

A Square learns this lesson early as he first visits Lineland in a dream. The
only distinction the natives can have is in their length. They see each other as
points, since they move along the same universal straight line. They estimate
how far away others are by their acute sense of hearing picking up the
difference between a bass left voice and a tenor right; the time lag in arrival
tells the distance. The king is longest, men next, then boys are stubby lines.
Women are mere points, of lower status. Their views of each other are partial
and instinctive. They never dream of how narrowly they see their world.

This sets the stage for A Square's conceptual blowout when a Sphere visits him
and yanks him up into the hallucinogenic universe of three dimensions. Its
realities are surrealistic. A Square straggles to fathom what for us is
instinctive.