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Re: The Very Very First Sentence

From:<jcowan@...>
Date:Friday, February 13, 2004, 22:29
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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Philippe Caquant <herodote92@...>