Eyes again

[ffutures]

OK, the consensus I got from a lot of people was that the eye / mouth thing is a bad idea. Having slept on it I've decided that I agree. It's something I can change relatively easily in the text, though it means a break with the previous version of the game - the graphics don't need to be changed since Flatlander eyes would be nothing like ours, a bit of hand-waving and they're there as part of the neural material to the sides of the mouth behind a transparent section of chitin. I'm thinking of an array of polarized light receptors. I'm going to do a big labelled anatomical thing when I get to the serious science stuff, I'll make it a bit more obvious in that.

I would have stuck with what I had but as someone pointed out it makes no sense from an evolutionary point of view, and eyes have evolved so often on Earth that it seems silly not to have something that doesn't have the feeding problem.

Many thanks to everyone who participated in the discussion - sorry I was so slow to convince, but I wanted to make sure that it wasn't just because the idea squicked people out. Don't worry - they're still going to be excreting through their mouths, the squick factor will still be there...

Comments

[cdybedahl.livejournal.com]

What does polarized light mean in a two-dimensional space? Or is Flatland light still our kind of light?

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

The way Abbot describes the light it's sourceless and omnipresent, which to me suggests that it's coming from outside the plane of Flatland. But in order to see objects light waves would have to be reflected absolutely horizontally - the only way I can see this work in a genuine one-atom-thick Flatland is if the waves are polarized in some way. So maybe 99.999% of light is reflected away and they're only seeing the tiny fraction of light waves that happen to be reflected exactly horizontally and polarized the right way. Whatever, I need a way to explain why their eyes aren't swamped with the omnipresent light, so sensitivity to a particular plane of polarization seems the way to go. It's hand waving, but I think it'll work.

[cdybedahl.livejournal.com]

If Flatland is one atom thick (that'd be about half a nanometer, assuming room for all the elements of the periodic table), then they live in a 3D space and we're talking plain ordinary light. Any light in the visible range will be pretty much polarized by necessity, given a 400-800 nm wave in a 0.5 nm space.

Here's a possible handwave: The autocreated light (where does that energy come from, anyway?) is monochromatic, and continously created at a constant rate all across the Flatland space. This means that nearly all atoms in Flatland will be in an excited state, having absorbed these fotons. When an external foton hits an excited atom, energy is released as a more energetic foton. Or, more simply put, the Flatlanders can tell the difference between omnipresent light and reflected light because reflected light has a different colour. Their brain wetware would probably be hardwired to filter the colour of the omnipresent light out entirely, making their subjective vision relatively normal from our point of view.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Yes, that makes a lot of sense. Do you mind if I paraphrase it?

[cdybedahl.livejournal.com]

Not at all.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Many thanks!

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

I'm going with our type of atoms for simplicity - The Planiverse, which I can't recommend too highly, assumes 2D atomic structure and describes a periodic table based on 2D atoms! So let's just say that they are normal atoms but confined to a plane one atom thick...

[heliograph.livejournal.com]

Don't worry - they're still going to be excreting through their mouths, the squick factor will still be there...

Which makes for a fun RPG how?

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Gooood question...

Don't worry, it'll be buried in the footnotes.