But first, a slight detour through Victorian Mathematical Fantasy.
Edwin A. Abbotts charming Victorian novella Flatland is set in a 2-dimensional world inhabited by geometrical shapes. Flatland is about to get all shook up when the novella’s main character, A. Square, is visited by a sphere who tries to explain the third dimension to him. Even though the sphere seemingly appears out of nowhere and apparently can change its size at will (by perpendicular movement through Flatland), A. Square is having none of it. Frustrated, the sphere kicks A. up and out of Flatland where A. can see inside the houses and bodies of the people of Flatland. Simultaneously! When I first read this, my mind was blown.
Sadly, I do not know of a way to enter a fourth spatial dimension to have such an experience myself. Does such a dimension even exist? For better and worse, lining up words does not necessarily make the corresponding ideas real. Even a two-dimensional world may not exist except as a thought exercise. If a two-dimensional world would exist however, slime mold Andi would make a great visitor: whenever I encounter slime molds they are always very flat and moving in a plane, and I can easily imagine Andi being neighborly with A. Square and the other denizens of flatland.
All of this made me think, would it be possible to lift Andi out of 2D space to experience three dimensions? To find this out, I filled a glass with a bottom layer of 3mm glass spheres, added a little bit of water, added a bit of Andi, filled the glass with a mix of glass spheres and oat flakes, and let the whole setup sit for a couple of days. Because the indices of refraction of air and glass are quite different, it was not easy to see what Andi was doing. Where they staunchly moving in sheet formation, or were they blossoming into psychedelic fractals?
As evidenced by the photo above, Andi broke on through to the other side, left space as they knew it, went boldly where no slime mold went before, kicked out the jams and got it on. Space, the final frontier, broke that day. To take the photo, I added sugar water with a similar index of refraction as the spheres to the setup, but I was not able to get a very clear shot. I did extract bits of Andi though, and will ask them to tell us about their adventures in the ultraworld.
To be continued!
