This article was taken from the January 2015 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Mathematician Ian Stewart wants us to see what he sees: snowflakes in fractional dimensions, hypercubes in 4D and 11-dimensional superstrings. So when the University of Warwick professor and author writes about these geometries, he relies on an analogy -- a way for us blockheads to understand realities above, below and in between our three dimensions. His guide is a little mathematical fantasy he read over half a century ago: the cult classic, Flatland.
Written in the early 1880s by Edwin A Abbott, the story follows A Square, a regular quadrilateral who lives on a 2D plane. He can't conceive of depth, but his perspective expands when a sphere visits him from 3D Spaceland. Though Square can't experience all three of the sphere's dimensions, he can see it in cross-section as a circle of various sizes. By describing what it's like for a flat object to imagine a solid one, Stewart can help us imagine a 4D object. A 4D sphere (called a glome) might appear to us as expanding and contracting spherical cross-sections. "Starting with Flatland's point of view," he says, "you find a way in." Stewart considers Flatland one of the earliest works of popular science, a genre he's been writing in for decades (his latest book came out in October). In addition to an annotated Flatland and its follow-up (Flatterland), he has collaborated on four books about the science of Terry Pratchett's Discworld, in which wizards ponder the strange technology of Earth.
In Flatland and Discworld, the act of removing yourself from your own reality allows you to understand it. And Stewart wants his readers to push that concept as far as they can. "How does the fourth dimension relate to the 11th?" Stewart asks. "We can crank up the analogy." Whatever you say, Professor -- we'll keep an eye out for Stringland.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
