Teach Yourself Ignorance...

I love my daddy becorse he give me a good ejukashun - Zoe; Aged 6

About 5000 years ago someone suddenly realised that simply by planting a stick in the ground they could make a shadow and measure the passage of time. The gnomon was the name given to the stick which cast the shadows across ancient Sumerian sundials. With a gnomon you could tell the time of day, the day of the month, the seasons of the year, the east from the west. You posessed knowledge.

Inhibition is a nail in the head...

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Take a strip of paper, give it a twist and stick the two ends together. You now have a Moebius Strip. The twist converts a two-dimensional flat strip of paper into a three-dimensional model with a curious property. You can pick it up and turn it around so obviously it occupies space, but if you run a finger around the surface (or edge) you end up where you started out. In effect it has neither back nor front, so doesn't occupy space. In which case, how can it be three-dimensional?

One can complicate the notion further. Make a Moebius model out of two strips of transparent material, say clear film, then fix them together. Image the space between the two as zero thickness. Cut a swastika out of black paper, insert it between the strips; slide it around and you'll discover it arrives back where it started except that the prongs have reversed. Slide it around once more and you'll discover it arrives back in its original form. This implies that if an astronaut made a similar round trip through a slice of space the same situation would occur. Unless he completed a couple laps his body would be permanently switched left to right. And if the strip was made out of mild steel and magnetized where would the north and south poles be?

The Rev. Edwin Abbott invented Flatland in 1884. This region is a two-dimensional plane populated by squares, circles and straight lines. Social status is determined by the number of sides one has, and moral character b acuteness of one's angles (the more acute, the more degenerate). One day the hero, Square, is started by the apparition of a point expanding in a circle; in fact circle is Sphere, who enlightens him by taking his brain to other dimensions. To learn what happened next you'll have to buy the book.

Humans could not exist in Flatland. To illustrate this (by analogy) Stephen Hawking produced a diagrammatic cross-section of a dos sliced through the digestive tract from mouth to anus. This demonstrated that a flat dog would fall apart. I was going to show the diagram but figured you could run it up in the mind....

Find out more about the 10 Dimensions here: href="http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4280922161474483340"

(C) 2007 SEASE Productions/Alan Fletcher (The Art Of Looking Sideway). Thanks also to Martin Gardner for the use of parts of "The Ambidextrous Universe"( Penguin, Harmondsworth 1967) as well as Edwin A. Abbott for use of "Flatland"(Oneworld, Oxford 1994).

There Are Two Infinities...God And Stupidity. Curious How They Both Seem To Coincide?