Tag: Edwin Abbott Abbott

A Dip into another Dimension

The July 4th long week-end is always a special one. It comes panting along after the first half of the year has whizzed past in a blur of life. The northern hemisphere goes on as it always has with winter transforming into glorious spring that gradually melts into summer haze.

School finishes with a flurry for the children and their long, luxurious summer holidays are there to stay, while those of who belong to the sterner corporate world have no such long, idle, ideal, vacations to look forward to. But the infectious joy of doing nothing is catching, and by the time this long week-end rolls around in the summer, there is an itch for the magical that is too strong to ignore.

So, we gave in. Going in to the long week-end, I took a long resolute sigh to not work over the weekend, and what was more, I kept my word. I only worried about the deadlines, and the nagging problems  a few times. For instance, I firmly pushed away worries about work when I was trying to be an otter, when I was gazing marvelously at the anchovies swimming beautifully in the forests of kelp, and while taking a long deep sigh at the deer grazing by a pod of pelicans in a lake nearby. 

We started the week-end to a marvelous romp to the library in which I picked out books like a hungry child at the candy store. I sat that evening looking contented and happy after a long-ish bath and read one children’s book after another. I admired Maya Lin’s Vietnam War Memorial, I sat up and had a couple of mind-blowing life’s lessons from Seussisms by Dr Seuss, while admiring the grit and tenacity of Helen Keller and her marvelous life with her teacher, Anne Sullivan. 

Helen Keller’s writings about absorbing the life around her was truly fascinating.

The next day, we set off to peek into another dimension altogether. It has been almost 2 years since we visited the Monterey Bay Aquarium thanks to the pandemic. But this week-end, in our resolve to make it magical, we went over there. You do have to get an appointment slot now, but once inside, all of the old magic stirs in your heart, and you feel lost without fins and scales.

I remember harking back to the book, Flatland by Edwin Abbott. Technically, watching the sea creatures in an aquarium setting does not constitute traveling to another dimension, but it feels like it. Every time. The tentacles of the octopus, the slow mesmerizing motion of the jellyfish, the all-encompassing tales of the ocean whisper and roar with every peek.

One instant, I remember looking at the manta-rays and the hammer-head sharks scattering the schools of fish as they lazed around their huge tank, and wondering where the turtles were, when a large one swept past me. Turtles aren’t particularly fast, but the wonder and excitement of seeing one swimming that close is enough to get your adventurous heart all a-swishing. 

Reading the assorted jumble of books this week-end, combined with the therapeutic effect of a peek into oceanic life, constitutes a dip into another dimension in my book, and I wish it with all my heart for all of you.

For as Helen Keller says:

The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched – they must be felt with the heart.

Helen Keller

Books:

2-d Meditations in our 3-d world

T’was a week-end that I was looking forward to. Which meant I looked forward to sleeping in. The son, however, has an internal alarm that seems to work contrary to social expectations.

yawn

Anyway, the point is, the son came up bright and shining. I lifted my tub from the covers and moaned from under the covers at his exuberant greeting. Hmmm….Hmmm…..AAAyyynnsnjsjfhsjfh!

He bustled into the room carrying a suspicious looking questionnaire. Just as I thought, the blasted thing turned out to be a Physics quiz that started with the question:

“What holds the quarks together in the nucleus of an atom?”

Luckily I knew the answer to that one (gluons), but it went downhill from there.

By the time we had arrived at the last question, my weak force was battling with the gravitational forces holding me down on the bed, and I sprang out in one gravity defying leap showing a strong force I did not think I was capable of, and hustled the little fellow and the husband out on a hike. If I was going to survive any more Physics quizzes on quarks, I needed to get my spark. 

The discussion on his favorite topics led us to the fascinating topics of dimensionality, and I told him about a particularly fetching piece on Flatland geometry in the book, How The Universe Got Its Spots – By Janna Levin.

Flatland is a fascinating piece of work written by Edwin Abbott Abbott in 1884. He imagines a two-dimensional world in which all occupants are lines, flat shapes or circles, and also examines a social construct with this premise.  (People with more number of sides occupy a higher social position, with priests being circles. In Victorian times, women had no ways and means to careers, and therefore were represented as lines in that universe.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wv0vxVRGMY (Carl Sagan explains flatland)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatland

That day on the hike, we went up and down the hills in the beautiful three dimensional world we live in, discussing what it would be like in Flatland.

In our everyday lives, rarely do we stop to think of flatland fantasies, and when we do, it is all the more magical. I mean how would a sunset look in Flatland? What would a sunset look like if we were in 4 dimensional worlds? Is our entire existence just us passing through this 3 dimensional world?

The gluon quiz master was, in the meanwhile, practicing his martial arts as he spurred himself through the hills, chipping in here and there, while listening fascinated to the Flatland theories. “Umm…Wonder whether that happened to Ant-man when he went into the quantum world.”

Wandering along by the waterside, watching the wind rippling the waters, and rustling the leaves in the trees nearby, it was beautiful indeed to occupy oneself with thoughts of how a wind would be in Flatland: maybe it would be like an earthquake to 3-dimensional creatures such as us. Maybe our cosmic upheavals are the breezes of the 4th and 5th dimensions. Who knows?

“Imagine, if you were an orange, trying to pass through the two-dimensional world.”

You could only see a dot as it touches the surface, and then a circle as it passes through flatland, a circle that gets bigger and bigger, and then recedes in size. Smaller and smaller till it becomes a point again and then disappears altogether.

Just as an orange cannot ‘get up’ from the 2-d world,   we cannot flit in and out of our 3-d worlds. But imagine if we could. If we could give ourselves the gift of perspective (that is another perspective –nature and our vast cosmos give us a fair sense of perspective already, if only we care to look and reflect of course)

Flatland

I am sure scientists who are spending their entire careers contemplating questions such as these are far more qualified to answer, but the very act of thinking seems to be a marvelously magical act. We admired our fellow creatures on our 3-dimensional walk in the hills: The geese, pelicans, seagulls and hawks.

Does a laugh in Flatland cause ripples? Do our laughs cause the butterflies to flit?

“Here is a joke for you”, I said on  the topic of laughs in inter-dimensional space. “What do you call a seagull that flies over a bay?”

“A Bagel – get it?” (a colleague’s joke!)

The joke was met with moans and laughs alike.

By that same extension, are all our lives just us passing through this 3-dimensional world? Where does Kung Fu Panda meet  interdimensional Physics and the Tao of Being?

I shrugged my 3-d shoulders. How quickly the contemplation of the physical world morphs into the philosophy of being? How easily our thoughts can become magical?  

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