The Scientists Ep. 1: Flatland -- Einstein's Muse

Welcome to a fascinating journey into the limits of imagination, geometry, and scientific discovery. In this premiere episode of "The Scientists," a new series on the Into The Impossible Podcast Network, host Brian Keating—Chancellor’s Distinguished Professor of Physics at UC San Diego—dives deep into the curious world of "Flatland," Edwin Abbott Abbott's mind-bending Victorian novel. But this isn't just dusty literature; it's a geometric allegory that shaped some of the greatest scientific minds, including Albert Einstein himself. Alongside surprising social commentary and a critique of rigid hierarchies, Keating unpacks the power of imagination in science, showing how boundary-pushing thinkers moved from heresy to genius. Sit back as you journey through dimensions with Brian Keating—plus a special segment from science communicator Carl Sagan—inviting you to rethink your own perspective on the universe and the unseen realities that might lie just beyond. Ready to challenge what you believe about reality? Stay curious and let’s step into the impossible together. Please join my mailing list here 👉 https://briankeating.com/list to win a meteorite 💥 Key Takeaways: 00:00 "Exploring Flatland's Timeless Influence" 06:26 "Dimensional Perception in Flatland" 09:45 "Exploring Influential Scientific Books" 13:11 "Revolutionary Thinking and Scientific Rebels" 15:54 "Flatland's Influence on Einstein" 20:44 "Flatland: Three-Dimensional Encounter" 24:38 Understanding the Tesseract's Dimensions - Additional resources: ➡️ Follow me on your fav platforms: ✖️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 🔔 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 📝 Join my mailing list: https://briankeating.com/list ✍️ Check out my blog: https://briankeating.com/cosmic-musings/ 🎙️ Follow my podcast: https://briankeating.com/podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

• 0:20Speaker 00

  Welcome to The Scientist, a new podcast under the umbrella of Into the Impossible Brian. I'm your host, Brian Keating, the chancellor's distinguished professor of physics at UC San Diego. And each week on The Scientist, I dive into the life and legacy of a legendary scientist, an experimentalist, a theorist, an observer, all of them uncovering insights you can apply to your own work and your own worldview. Science didn't appear fully formed. It was built by real people, solving real problems under pressure with very human desires. Their ideas still shape our future. We'll examine not just what they discovered, what drove them to make those discoveries,

• 1:02Speaker 00

  and most importantly of all, who they were, from their obsessions and honors to their most spectacular ideas, their most brilliant blunders, and their most beautiful of all human flaws. Imagine a world with no up, no down, just length and width, no height, a flat, silent plane where geometry is destiny and thinking in 3D is blasphemy. Welcome to Flatland. It's not just a story of math. It's a Victorian epic era, a science fiction fantasy, a red pill for physicists.

• 1:44Speaker 00

  It's the allegory that put the theory of geometric unification into string theory, seven decades before string theory was even a glimmer in its creator's eyes. It's the mirror maze that Einstein stared deeply into, and today, we're diving deep, as deep as we can, into the Flatland. But first, why would a novel written from 1884, written by a schoolmaster, still blow physicists' minds today? And why do I give it out to everyone who subscribes to my Monday Magic mailing list on my website at briankeating.com/list? You'll actually get a copy of it emailed to you.

• 2:27Speaker 00

  Einstein didn't read Flatland once. He devoured it, reading it again and again, because it taught him something that equations alone could not. Imagine being so trapped in your own world that the very concept of up was heretical. That was Flatland.

• 2:47Speaker 00

  It's a fictional universe where you, the narrator, are a square, literally. Your name is a square. Society is geometry, and discovering an extra dimension gets you locked away as a schizophrenic madman. But what if this weird little book from 1984 wasn't just satire? What if it was a user manual for future physicists? Because here's the truth. Einstein used it to teach relativity. String theorists used it to visualize 10 dimensions. And every physicist you've ever admired has at some point pinned a Flatlander trying to escape from the plane. Stay with me, because in the next few minutes, we're going to explore and unlock the dimensional

• 3:29Speaker 00

  imagination that helped some of the greatest obsessive geniuses in history see the shape of spacetime itself. And the ending, well, it's not just about some square. It's about you.

• 3:47Speaker 00

  Part one, the two-dimensional universe of obedience.

• 3:54Speaker 00

  Okay, so this book is written by Edwin Abbott Abbott. Yes, they doubled down, they squared his name. He's an English theologian, a headmaster, and a polymath. In 1984, he wrote Flatland, subtitle of Romance of Many Dimensions. On the surface, it's a fable, a science fiction fantasy, a geometrical fable. But underneath, it's a mathematical rebellion, a sociological scalpel, and a physics prophecy. Here's the premise: you are a square. That's your name, capital S, square. You live in Flatland, which is a two-dimensional world. You can't look up or down, perpendicular to the plane of existence. Those ideas, those dimensions, to you and others, do not exist.

• 4:39Speaker 00

  They're forbidden, locked off permanently.

• 4:43Speaker 00

  All you know is forward, backward, left and right. The catch? Your social class is literally the number of sides your polygon shape possesses. Squares have four. Triangles are of a lower class. They're violent and dumb. They only have three sides. They're soldiers. Squares, that's you, are part of the middle class. The bourgeoisie, if you will.

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  Pentagons, hexagons, and so on, become leveling up, level up their way to the elite.

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  Oh, and circles with infinite number of sides, if you will. They're the high priest of society.

• 5:27Speaker 00

  And women, haha, they're not even two dimensional. They're lines, infinitely thin, and to a square, they're regarded as dangerous. So they're kept away, locked in rooms, lest they might pierce the polygonal shapes of the men that drive society. Now, Abbott was writing satire in the late 1800s. But he wasn't disguising it in metaphors. He disguised it in a mathematical Euclidean metaphor so Victorian censors wouldn't ban him outright. In Flatland, your shape is your destiny. And any deviation is treasonous.

• 6:14Speaker 00

  Part two, the heresy of height. Everything changes when, one day, the square is visited by a sphere.

• 6:26Speaker 00

  What?

• 6:29Speaker 00

  This globular blob arrives in Flatland, not all at once, but in slices of perception. First, he appears as just a dot, then a glowing circle with no boundary in sight. But then, as his midpoint, his equator, passes through the plane of Flatland, he shrinks, smaller and smaller, circles diameter decreasing, and shrinking until, all of a sudden, all at once, he's gone.

• 6:58Speaker 00

  To the 2D beings of Flatland, it's supernatural, but it's not magic. It's a result of dimensional ignorance, and it might be something we too are guilty of in our inability to grasp higher dimensional realities, such as those presented by possible theories of everything like string theory.

• 7:20Speaker 00

  So, as Square, the narrator, wonders, how can an object, a being, grow and shrink, always remaining perfectly infinitely sided, and then disappear without moving?

• 7:33Speaker 00

  The only way he can, is realized, is if he's not bound by your dimensions.

• 7:40Speaker 00

  We'll be right back after this short break. The sphere tries to explain. These objects and the people and these inhabitants of Flatland have other properties. They have a luminous, they have a luminousness, they have cognition, they dwell in houses, they consume, and they construct a civilization

• 8:08Speaker 00

  that knows no third dimension.

• 8:13Speaker 00

  Now, the square, at first, can hardly process what he's seen. He fights, he refuses, he goes through the stages of grief, but then eventually he believes. But the problem is, he's alone. Like Galileo before the Inquisition, which happened a mere 250 years before this book was written, the square starts preaching the truth. And like Galileo, he's silenced.

• 8:45Speaker 00

  Flatland society isn't just blind to three dimensions, it's hostile to it.

• 8:51Speaker 00

  And of course, Flatland is leaving breadcrumbs, if you will, a blueprint to understand relativity. For us spacelanders, for us three dimensional creatures, to appreciate and apprehend four dimensions, we can benefit from the square's apprehension of three dimensions.

• 9:14Speaker 00

  Einstein was born five years after Flatland was published. But physicists for the next century would use Abbott's metaphor to describe four specific things. Time as the fourth dimension, curvature of that unified four dimensional spacetime, later, extra dimensions in string theory, and fourth, the multiverse so-called brains in the so-called M theory or membrane theory. Now, other books we're going to encounter in this series that I've had the desire, compassion and ability to read over these four decades of my scientific upbringing

• 9:58Speaker 00

  with the greatest minds in history of my teachers. We'll talk about these ideas and how influential they were to people like past guest Lisa Randle and past guest Brian Greene. Lisa wrote Warped Passages, and Brian, of course, wrote The Elegant Universe, one of the most popular books celebrating its 25th anniversary. And even Carl Sagan's famous Apple demo on Cosmos. We'll get to Carl Sagan's biography, which is very contentiously written by Kay Davis about 25 years ago, soon after he passed. It's not appreciated by the past guest on the show, Andrea or her daughter, who's also a guest, Sasha Sagan. We'll cover all those books in our obsessive mind series.

• 10:43Speaker 00

  But we are just flatlanders trying to understand a higher dimensional reality. It wasn't just for the square, it's for us. It's not a metaphor, it's physics at its core.

• 10:56Speaker 00

  The fourth part of this book is the philosophy of dimensional ignorance. Flatland is also an epistemological bomb. How do we know what exists? What are the limits of perception? How do we distinguish delusion from higher dimensional truth? Abbott Square didn't look, Abbott Square didn't lack intelligence. He lacked a conceptual vocabulary for up. Just like today's humans, no matter how bright they are, lack the conceptual vocabulary to describe five dimensional string vibrations. Or, as you'll encounter on my other channel, Professor Keating's experiments.

• 11:39Speaker 00

  We're going to talk a lot about Searn Simon's actions, which are topological gadgets that link together geometry with property of mathematics called holonomy and more. And the best part is these are observables that have been witnessed and even for which have been awarded Nobel prizes. Can we imagine taste? The five different types of taste as a dimension, our senses as dimension. Even consciousness could be type of dimension. Philosophers sometimes call this a category error. You're asking flat questions in a spherical reality.

• 12:19Speaker 01

  At Edward Jones, we believe rich is more than caring about the latest and greatest. It's also taking care of what gives your life meaning. That's why your dedicated financial advisor meets you where you are with personalized financial strategies that help protect what matters so you can preserve your progress while creating a path forward. The key to being rich is knowing what counts. Let's find your rich together. Edward Jones. Member SIPC.

• 12:52Speaker 00

  The fifth part of the book gets into the social dimension. And there's obviously a subtext. Flatland is a critique. Flatland is also a critique of gender oppression. It's a roast of the British class hierarchy that extended to the subcontinent of India, and of course, to Africa and other colonies. But at its heart, it's a warning about the intellectual elite, the orthodoxy. We see that now in our academic institutions that are being attacked from without and from within. And I see that firsthand here, within the ivy ensconced walls, actually, the palm tree ensconced walls of the University of California.

• 13:34Speaker 00

  Abbott saw how societies enforced dimensional conformity and what that represents, literally and metaphorically. Don't look up. Don't think outside the box. Stay in your plane, not in your lane. So, does that sound familiar? Every revolution begins with a shapeshift, a change. Those that see more than often are treated as criminals, at first, outcasts, not as prophets. From Galileo to Vera Rubin, every scientific rebel that we'll encounter, including my first guest, Freeman Dyson, was once considered, was once a type of dimensional heretic. So where are we still, us Flatlanders?

• 14:19Speaker 00

  When physicists refuse to engage with philosophers? When string theory becomes doctrine instead of conjecture? When academics build walls, siloing themselves instead of bridges? Not only between themselves, but between the public at large who pay our salaries? I gave this warning months ago, in my Magic Monday mailing list, that we treated the public as just a reliable source of income, without giving back to them, without providing things like this, I have to say, not tooting my own horn, but giving back at no profit

• 14:58Speaker 00

  to myself, such that you, who pay my salary, can benefit from the discoveries that your hard-earned money and tax dollars have enabled. Flatland was a warning, maybe gave me a glimpse, but it's from more than a century before I actually read it.

• 15:23Speaker 00

  So the frontiers that we always are seeking but never achieving in physics is not math. It's imagination. So what is more real, what you can measure or what you can conceive? The square saw a literal shadow of truth, and for that was exiled from his reality, his domain and his society. But you, you have the sphere's story. You see what squares and triangles could not. But can you see beyond? Beyond our three-dimensional existence?

• 16:01Speaker 00

  What will you do to peer into a new reality? Einstein once said, "Imagination is more important than knowledge." Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the three-dimensional world. I don't know about you, but if I'm going under the knife in surgery, as I recently did for a torn ligament in my meniscus in my knee, I certainly didn't want my surgeon to have all that much imagination and creativity. I wanted him to have knowledge, and he did, and I'm feeling much better.

• 16:43Speaker 00

  But Einstein said this in part for poetic, with poetic license, but he also meant it. Before the tensor calculus, before the field equations, before the contractions and dilations, he asked a question that Abbott taught us how to ask. What does the world look like from another dimension? That's Flatland. Einstein read it not to laugh or poke fun at the Victorian mindset of just a few decades before his birth, but to train his mind to imagine motion as curvature, to imagine time as space, to see past what was visible and create what was true. So let's tie the loop. Flatland isn't fiction. It's protophysics.

• 17:27Speaker 00

  It's what happens when you take curiosity seriously and let it mutate into genius. You clicked this episode because of Einstein, perhaps.

• 17:38Speaker 00

  So here's the payoff you've been waiting for. Before he discovered spacetime, Einstein had to learn to see the world like a square visited by a sphere. That's the lineage. That's the legacy. That's the inheritance. And guess what? Now it's yours. This episode shifted your dimensional perspective, even by a mere fractional dimension. Please share it with somebody who still thinks in two dimensions. Subscribe to the podcast wherever you're listening or watching the audiogram. Leave a review, leave a comment and stay curious. Next week, we're going to be looking into some of the cosmologists who studied the hidden

• 18:23Speaker 00

  matter that matters lurking in the cosmos. Until then, don't just look forward, don't look back. Look up. It's your privilege. It's your right. And this is The Scientist on the Into the Impossible Podcast Network.

• 19:11Speaker 01

  At Edward Jones, we believe rich is more than caring about the latest and greatest. It's also taking care of what gives your life meaning. That's why your dedicated financial advisor meets you where you are with personalized financial strategies that help protect what matters so you can preserve your progress while creating a path forward. The key to being rich is knowing what counts. Let's find your rich together. Edward Jones. Member SIPC.