Scenario title

[ffutures]

For some reason I feel a VERY strong urge to write a Flatland scenario outline called "At the mountains of flatness," but have no idea what it should be about except that non-Euclidean geometry should come in somewhere. Any suggestions?

Comments

[autopope.livejournal.com]

Obvious -- sanity-threatening monsters are intruding from the third dimension and must be stopped! (cf. Call of Cthulhu, starring us in the squamous-and-rugose role.)

[doctor-toc.livejournal.com]

And, of course, reality altering mathmatics must be included.

[sharikkamur.livejournal.com]

With numbers such as i

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

I was vaguely thinking of invoking spherical geometry - for some reason the adventurers stumble across proof that Flatland is curved, not flat. This might work if the curvature is normally too small to notice, but they're given something like a surveying job that takes in so large a chunk of Flatland that none of the trig quite works out.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

Or they move from a locally-flat region to a region with (increasingly?) higher curvature.

When talking about Kaluza-Klein theory I often imagine a Flatlander confined to the surface of a soda straw. In reality he is a 2-dimensional being, but one dimension is closed and rolled up so tightly that he thinks he is a 1-dimensional being, able to move only forward or backward along the soda straw.

This helps to visualize the multiple rolled-up, Planck-length-curvature dimensions our universe is supposed to have in K-K theory.

(I think my analogy even made it into a Heechee novel, a while after I discussed it in Fred Pohl's kitchen...)

[doctor-toc.livejournal.com]

Of course, you know that someone has to be turned into a mobius strip...

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Hmmmm.... Evil...

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

Would "At the Fountains of Flatness" be better?

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Now, how does a fountain work in a 2D world...?

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

Fair question, but it's probably no harder to make a fountain work than to make a mountain work!

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Flatland mountains are simply impassable masses of rock. You have to go around them, and since there is a weak gravitational pull to the South you get occasional avalanches along the sides etc.

I suppose you could have some sort of North-firing fountain - the water would curve back and end up going south - but the actual business of piping water in a 2D world is VERY tricky, may not work at all.