Could there be more dimensions? Review of Flatland, a movie

Warning: Don’t try to imagine how people see in a two dimensional world, it will injure your brain. 

A Square living in a two dimensional world is in a hot argument with a Point living in just one dimension. Each one believes his own world is complete and that the world was the world and there was nothing bigger than it or beyond it.

Enter Cube from a three dimensional world, the world that we live in now. Cube takes Square to the 3D world and manages to convince him that there is a third dimension. To show him, he moves sideways and up and down.

Square is convinced there are other dimensions and that they are infinite. Cube believes his is the ultimate world while Square thinks there could be millions of other creatures living in millions of other dimensions infinitely.

I was discussing this book called Flatland with a friend, who’d already read it and suggested I not even try because it’s difficult to imagine a world in 2D. I said, I will give it a try and since then I am yet to buy a copy of the book.

But then I saw a movie based on the book and couldn’t help but watch it.

To think of a fourth or a fifth dimensional space from the lens of our own existing laws of Physics and Mathematics would be problematic. But there could be other laws in other dimensions, which makes it more compelling and interesting to think of the possibilities.

Hollywood movies and films have restricted our imaginations of extraterrestrial life. We think of aliens having huge round head with antennas and long slimy fingers. But possibilities are, as always, infinite. We could very well be living among aliens right now and not even know about it, - a reality crossover.

It is fascinating to simply consider diverse possibilities such as those that tell us we are mere characters in an alien computer simulation and that the whole universe that we know today is an infenetissamliy tiny microscopic dot within a whole new level of universe.

Stephen Hawkins in his famous Brief History of Time offers a visual analogy. If a creature from a three dimensional space where to live on a two dimensional world, it would divide the creature into two halves, since we have a passage right through our body for eating and excreting. Perhaps the picture beside would help you understand what exactly Hawkman meant.

Could there be infinite dimensions with their own laws of physics and mathematics quite different from ours? Are we living among creatures from other dimensions, completely unaware of each others’ existence? Well, these are just some interesting things to wonder upon.