Re: The Very Very First Sentence

Philippe Caquant scripsit:

> We also can imagine a 2-d world, non-physical of
> course, with or without movement. We can also imagine
> a physical world with no time and no movement.
> Something like a picture shot by a 3-d camera. There
> could be a ball suspended in the air in it, it would
> never rise nor fall, even if gravity would exist in
> that world.
>
> We can imagine a 1-d world. That would be a single
> line, and there could be points and segments on that
> line. Points could move, or could not move. There
> could be time or not.
>
> Can we imagine a 0-d world ? Well, I can't. Maybe only
> a temporal world, with no space at all ? What could
> such a thing be ?
2d (and 1d and even 0d) worlds are described in detail in Edwin Abbott's
mathematical fiction _Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions_.
The text is available at http://www.gutenberg.net/etext94/flat11.txt .
There is also a French translation by Elisabeth Gille (Editions
Denole, 1968, reprinted 1984), but I don't know the title.

Most of the book is about the 2d world; the 1d and 0d worlds
are visited in Sections 13-14 and 20.
--
John Cowan  jcowan@reutershealth.com  www.ccil.org/~cowan  www.reutershealth.com
"The competent programmer is fully aware of the strictly limited size of his own
skull; therefore he approaches the programming task in full humility, and among
other things he avoids clever tricks like the plague."  --Edsger Dijkstra

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