Flatland

Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, the book is a satirical novella by the English schoolmaster Edwin Abbott. Written pseudonymously by "A Square," this book uses the fictional two-dimensional realm of Flatland to reflect on the hierarchy of Victorian society, but the novella's more enduring contribution is its exploration of dimensions. Several movies have been made from the story, for example, the feature film Flatland (2007). Other attempts have been short or experimental films, like the one narrated by Dudley Moore and the short films Flatland 2: Sphereland (2012) after Flatland: The Movie (2007). Although Flatland was ok when published, it did not obtain a great success. In the listing on Edwin Abbott in the Dictionary of National Biography, Flatland is not even mentioned. This book was discovered again after Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity was published, which introduced the concept of a fourth dimension. Flatland was referred to in a letter entitled "Euclid, Newton and Einstein" published in Nature. In this letter Abbott is depicted, as a prophet due to his intuition of the importance of time to explain certain phenomena: Many years in the past a little jeu d'esprit Dr. Edwin Abbott wrote a piece entitled Flatland. If there is a motion of our three-dimensional space pertinent to the fourth dimension, all the changes we encounter and assign to the flow of time will simply be because this movement, the bulk of the future as well as the past always existing in the fourth dimension.