Toward the end of the 19th century, amateur mathe- matician Edwin A. Abbott wrote a slim volume entitled Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, which has since become a science-fiction classic. With wry humor, Abbott set forth the difficulties of comprehending any world containing a different number of dimen-sions from the observer's own. Thus, to the inhabitants of one-dimensional Line-land, the comings and goings of two-dimensional Flatlanders appear as if by magic-leaping out of sight at one point along the linear world and abruptly reap-pearing at another, without seeming to traverse the intervening distance. Simi-larly, to Flatlanders the denizens of three-dimensional Spaceland seem to be alien creatures capable of hopping on and off the world plane at will.
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