The Planiverse
Encyclopedia

Development

In 1977, Dewdney was inspired by an allegory of a two-dimensional universe, and decided to expand upon the physics and chemistry of such a universe.He published a short monograph
Monograph
A monograph is a work of writing upon a single subject, usually by a single author.It is often a scholarly essay or learned treatise, and may be released in the manner of a book or journal article. It is by definition a single document that forms a complete text in itself...

 in 1979 called Two-Dimensional Science and Technology.In July 1980, this was reviewed by Martin Gardner
Martin Gardner
Martin Gardner was an American mathematics and science writer specializing in recreational mathematics, but with interests encompassing micromagic, stage magic, literature , philosophy, scientific skepticism, and religion...

 in Scientific American
Scientific American
Scientific American is a popular science magazine. It is notable for its long history of presenting science monthly to an educated but not necessarily scientific public, through its careful attention to the clarity of its text as well as the quality of its specially commissioned color graphics...

, and shortly after this, all copies of the monograph were sold out.In 1981, following the success of the monograph, Dewdney published A Symposium on Two-Dimensional Science and Technology, which contained suggestions for how a two-dimensional universe would work from scientists and non-scientists on varied subjects.

Plot

In the spirit of Edwin Abbott Abbott
Edwin Abbott Abbott
Edwin Abbott Abbott , English schoolmaster and theologian, is best known as the author of the satirical novella Flatland .-Biography:...

's Flatland
Flatland
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions is an 1884 satirical novella by the English schoolmaster Edwin Abbott Abbott. Writing pseudonymously as "A Square", Abbott used the fictional two-dimensional world of Flatland to offer pointed observations on the social hierarchy of Victorian culture...

, Dewdney and his computer science students designed a vertical 2D world (i.e. East-West and Up-Down, no N-S) and considered the issues of biology
Biology
Biology is a natural science concerned with the study of life and living organisms, including their structure, function, growth, origin, evolution, distribution, and taxonomy. Biology is a vast subject containing many subdivisions, topics, and disciplines...

 and society
Society
A society, or a human society, is a group of people related to each other through persistent relations, or a large social grouping sharing the same geographical or virtual territory, subject to the same political authority and dominant cultural expectations...

 for the inhabitants.

To their surprise, they find their artificial 2D universe has somehow accidentally become a means of communication with an actual 2D world - Arde.
They make a sort of "telepathic" contact with "YNDRD," referred to by the students as Yendred, a highly philosophical Ardean (or Nsana, as they call themselves), as he begins a journey across the single continent Ajem Kollosh to learn more about a mysterious philosophy the inhabitants of his destination have.

The students and narrator communicate with Yendred by typing on the keyboard, and Yendred describes how he "feels" their thoughts in his head. For Yendred's replies, he thinks an answer, and it appears on the computer's printout. Yendred's name is actually "Dewdney" reversed, or "Yendwed", as spoken by one of the students with a speech impediment.

Written as a travelogue
Travel literature
Travel literature is travel writing of literary value. Travel literature typically records the experiences of an author touring a place for the pleasure of travel. An individual work is sometimes called a travelogue or itinerary. Travel literature may be cross-cultural or transnational in focus, or...

, Yendred crosses the world to reveal its features, explaining to the students diverse topics such as the politics
Politics
Politics is a process by which groups of people make collective decisions. The term is generally applied to the art or science of running governmental or state affairs, including behavior within civil governments, but also applies to institutions, fields, and special interest groups such as the...

, geography
Geography
Geography is the science that studies the lands, features, inhabitants, and phenomena of Earth. A literal translation would be "to describe or write about the Earth". The first person to use the word "geography" was Eratosthenes...

, construction
Construction
In the fields of architecture and civil engineering, construction is a process that consists of the building or assembling of infrastructure. Far from being a single activity, large scale construction is a feat of human multitasking...

 (all houses are underground, for example, so as not to impede movement), tool
Tool
A tool is a device that can be used to produce an item or achieve a task, but that is not consumed in the process. Informally the word is also used to describe a procedure or process with a specific purpose. Tools that are used in particular fields or activities may have different designations such...

s (nails are useless for attaching two objects, tape and glue are used instead), biology
Biology
Biology is a natural science concerned with the study of life and living organisms, including their structure, function, growth, origin, evolution, distribution, and taxonomy. Biology is a vast subject containing many subdivisions, topics, and disciplines...

 (there is no digestive tract in most Ardean creatures, because of the danger of splitting into two, but evolution devised a solution), astronomy
Astronomy
Astronomy is a natural science that deals with the study of celestial objects and phenomena that originate outside the atmosphere of Earth...

, and even game
Game
A game is structured playing, usually undertaken for enjoyment and sometimes used as an educational tool. Games are distinct from work, which is usually carried out for remuneration, and from art, which is more often an expression of aesthetic or ideological elements...

s (such as one-dimensional Alak), all designed for fit in 2D. An appendix explains some fundamentals of Ardean two-dimensional physics and chemistry.

See also

  • Alak
  • Creatures
    Creatures (artificial life program)
    Creatures is an artificial life computer program series, created in the mid-1990s by English computer scientist Steve Grand whilst working for the Cambridge computer games developer Millennium Interactive...

     (inspired by The Planiverse)
  • Flatland
    Flatland
    Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions is an 1884 satirical novella by the English schoolmaster Edwin Abbott Abbott. Writing pseudonymously as "A Square", Abbott used the fictional two-dimensional world of Flatland to offer pointed observations on the social hierarchy of Victorian culture...

  • Flatterland
    Flatterland
    Flatterland is a 2001 book by mathematician and science popularizer Ian Stewart about non-Euclidean geometry. It was written as a sequel to Flatland, an 1884 novel that discussed different dimensions.-Plot summary:Almost 100 years after A...

  • Sphereland
    Sphereland
    Sphereland: A Fantasy About Curved Spaces and an Expanding Universe is a 1965 novel by Dionys Burger, and is a sequel to Flatland, a novel by "A Square" . The novel expands upon the social and mathematical foundations on which Flatland is based...

  • Spaceland

Further reading

  • Begley, Sharon. 1982. "Life in Two Dimensions." Newsweek. January 18, pp. 84–85.
  • Dewdney, A.K. 1979. "Exploring the Planiverse." Journal of Recreational Mathematics. 12:16-20.
  • Dewdney, A.K. 2000. "The Planiverse Project: Then and Now." The Mathematical Intelligencer. 22:46-51.
  • Gardner, Martin. 1980/2001. "The Wonders of a Planiverse." Scientific American, July 1980; reprinted with appendix in The Colossal Book of Mathematics (New York: Norton).
  • Sandberg-Diment, Erik. 1984. "Review of Dewdney 1984/2001". New York Times, November 6.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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