More on Flatland eyes

[ffutures]

Yesterdays mini-argument about the eye-mouths of the Flatlanders got me thinking about something I'd like to put in the "serious science stuff" appendix for the RPG - e.g. the cool stuff I've thought of that isn't actually needed to run the game. Just exactly how does a Flatlander see?

The problem is that there is no day or night in Flatland - there is all-pervasive sourceless illumination. And sourceless presumably means that it is occurring inside a Flatlander as well as outside, e.g. inside the Flatlander's eye. Theoretically this ought to drown out any light coming from the outside, unless there is some mechanism (such as a lens) to concentrate a lot of external light. Even then the optic nerves would be firing constantly, making it very difficult to perceive details. We know (because Abbot tells us) that they can see, although not very well - however, their visual problems are partly a result of the 2D environment and partly caused by the constant mist that he describes, which limits visibility to a few feet.

So I think that what I need is a neural mechanism that is very good at detecting light coming in horizontally but ignores all other sources. And that is only one molecule thick (one atom theoretically, but I'm going to allow myself a little leeway here.)

My best though here is an arc of something like flat optical fibres, set up so that any photons coming in anything other than horizontally whizz out again. With something to reduce horizontal scatter, e.g. a pinhole camera mechanism. This would explain the mouth/eye structures I put on my previous drawings quite well - the lips (more like mandibles)/eyelids are opaque, with a teeny gap at the corner which works like a pinhole camera. When a Flatlander wants to eat it opens its mouth/eye and the mandibles slice off bits of food. It is somehow pushed out of the cavity and down into the rest of the flatlander as past as possible, but even so a Flatlander will effectively be blind for a few seconds every time it eats a mouth-full of food.

One result of this is that the narrower figures (especially isosceles and females) will have very narrow fields of vision, which could be a problem.

Okay, that's my first thoughts - anyone able to suggest a better mechanism?

Comments

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

Magic? :)

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

I'd really prefer not.

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

Is it ever specified what wavelength of light they can see in?

Perhaps they have something similiar to the CMOS or CCD chips in digital cameras?

I'm honestly not scientifically minded enough to be of much help here. Hence my suggestion of Flatlanders running around with +1 magical swords and Visors of Seeing.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

It's just a sourceless white light, so pretty vague.

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

Also, entirely unrelated, wasn't Dr Who supposed to be on at 7 this week? Or have the BBC moved it's timeslot yet again?

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Football ran late.

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

Ah. I see. But next week they say it will be on at 6:35.

*insert standard BBC rant here*

[robertprior.livejournal.com]

I seem to have missed the bit in the book where Abbot says their eyes and mouths are the same. Which section is it? I'll have more comments after I check the original source material.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

He doesn't get specific at all - but he does say that if any side is broken they die, which implies that there can't be more than one opening.

This is open to a lot of interpretation - it could be treated as them being abstract geometric shapes with no biology etc. at all, for example, but in my opinion it's more fun to find ways to make them work as organisms. Especially since I've now replaced most of the graphics with "organic" versions...

[robertprior.livejournal.com]

I'm afraid I'm not following your logic. How do you get from "any broken side is death" to "only one opening"?

I can see that a tube-gut is out, but you could have, for example, food ingested 'floating' around their innards (lookng rather like vacuoles) and then excreted through a temporary sphincter.

Likewise you could have various light-sensitive spots or cup eyes around the perimeter.

What's your time-frame for finalizing this?

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Hopefully early next month.

There are lots of problems with multiple body openings in something that's one atom / molecule thick and appears to have an exoskeleton. Even nerves would weapen it.


I ought to mention that this has been like this through two releases of the game over several years - I'd really prefer not to make major changes at this stage. I'm simply trying to expand some of the details.

[robertprior.livejournal.com]

I'm thinking that the exoskeleton doesn't need to have permanent openings for many functions. For excreting, for example, your internal blob of material hits the inside of the exoskeleton, at which point the exoskeleton begins to develop on the inside edge of the blob (the outer edge is already against the exoskeleton). Once the inner membrane is complete, the exoskeleton splits, the blob is expelled, and then the exoskeleton fuses again. Once it is fused the membrane dissolves. Could be relatively quick.

[robertprior.livejournal.com]

Similarly, for eyes you could have transparent sections that admit light into the interior. Once there various fibre-optic-like bits could direct it towards the central nervous system (or what passes for one in a Flatlander).

Implications of this (using the exoskeleton for seeing) is that soldiers and the lower orders have trouble seeing what's directly in front of them (assuming a mouth at the apex instead of an eye). I can see advantages (in battle, officers have a better view than their men) but you might not like the implications.

You could use the same mechanism I used for excrement for eating, if it's in reverse. It means thaat eating takes longer and is a vulerable time, but that has interesting role-playing implications.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

The "vomiting instead of excreting" thing is discussed in The Planiverse, though the author came up with another answer - a thing he described as a "zipper organ" along the gut which meant that his 2D creatures could eat at one end and excrete at the other without falling apart.

Like the fine details of how sight works, I'll probably be discussing the Flatland version of digestion etc. in the scientific section. I'm waiting to read Iain Sinclair's "Flatterland" first, since he's the kind of guy who thinks of this sort of thing and may have answers to a lot of the technical problems we're discussing. If so I'll need to contact him about using them - fortunately we've met a few times so hopefully he'd be willing to go along with it for a charity project.

[robertprior.livejournal.com]

I've skimmed Flatterland, and didn't spot discussions like that (which was rather disappointing, as Stewart's books with Jack Cohen had raised my hopes). I might have missed it, though.

I'll admit the combination eye-mouth organs bother me. Being blind while eating seems like a really big evolutionary drawback, especially for Flatland herbivores that (presumably) would have to spend a lot of time eating.

[captboulanger.livejournal.com]

What about simply having sections of their outside permiter that have exposed optic nerves with some sort of "lens" over them, rather than more of an "eyeball" like arrangement? And they should probably have several, since the main issue would be depth perception and this would allow for triangulation....

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Remember that if they are truly two-dimensional each hole for an eye and nerve would be a break in the outer line, which acts as an exoskeleton, and would severely weaken it.

[dsample.livejournal.com]

This assumes that you need a "hole." There are lots of materials that are quite strong, and are still transparent. A lens in the exoskeleton made of an organic Flatlander equivalent to plexiglass wouldn't cause any weakness in the structure of the exoskeleton.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

That's certainly a possibility.

[dsample.livejournal.com]

I'm unfamiliar with the specifics of Flatland. Is it a true two dimensional universe, or is it just a place where everything is flat, and the inhabitatants have no concept of a third dimension?

If it is a truely 2D universe then the concept of "thickness" just doesn't apply. Not even a single atoms' worth. Either way, if Flatlanders have something analogous to an eye what they will perceive will be a one dimensional line, of varying brightness. Give them two such eyes, and their brains will be able to construct a 2D view of their world, similarly to the way our brains construct a 3D view of our world from the two slightly different views from each of our eyes.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

That isn't the problem - I could come up with a dozen different types of eye fairly easily if the interior of the eye was relatively dark - the main reason I went with a single eye / mouth when I wrote the original game a few years ago was to keep the lines unbroken since Abbot made such a big point of it.

What I'm actually worried about here is how the actual visual mechanism - the optic nerves etc. - can filter out the sourceless and omnipresent light described by Abbot. I'm trying to think of a mechanism for any type of eye that will distinguish between light reflected from other object that's coming in horizontally and light that's just present inside the eyeball / cone / optic nerve etc. Polarization seems the best bet so far.

[cdybedahl.livejournal.com]

The question if it's a two-dimenstional space or a nearly-2D slice of a three-dimensional space is still relevant. The physics would be extremely different in the two cases.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

Every particle of my being wishes to point out Kee Dewdney's work on Flatlander physics and engineering, but this would be pointless, as it's inconceivable that you don't already know about it.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Yep, I've read it and have it listed as an essential source. I'm glad to see it's back in print. There are some obvious differences since his creatures live on the rim of a disk, so have the concept of "up" and "down" and one version of sideways, and gravity does make some gadgets a LOT easier to build, but even so I had to resist the temptation to nick lots of technology from it. So about the only gadgets I describe are cannon (you have to run the fuse down the barrel, of course, which does tend to cause a few problems) and a system for a group of soldiers to ford a river using two strong isosceles and a length of rope:

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Forgot to say, that's from the first release of the game - I'm prettying it up a little for the PDF.

Any idea if the 2001 release of The Planiverse adds any material that wasn't in the first edition?

[ggreig]

Small spelling error in a couple of places; "taught" should be "taut".

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Not a problem - I've rewritten the text completely anyway.