The Planiverse: Computer Contact with a Two-Dimensional World / Edition 1

by A.K. Dewdney

Overview

When The Planiverse first appeared 16 years ago, it caught more than a few readers off guard. The line between willing suspension of dis- lief and innocent acceptance, if it exists at all, is a thin one. There were those who wanted to believe, despite the tongue-in-cheek subtext, that we had made contact with a two-dimensional world called Arde, a di- shaped planet embedded in the skin of a vast, balloon-shaped space called the planiverse. It is tempting to imagine that those who believed, as well as those who suspended disbelief, did so because of a persuasive consistency in the cosmology and physics of this inflnitesimally thin universe, and x preface to the millennium edition in its bizarre but oddly workable organisms. This was not just your r- of-the-mill universe fashioned out of the whole cloth of wish-driven imagination. The planiverse is a weirder place than that precisely - cause so much of it was “worked out” by a virtual team of scientists and technologists. Reality, even thepseudoreality of such a place, is - variably stranger than anything we merely dream up.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780387989167
Publisher:	Springer New York
Publication date:	10/12/2000
Edition description:	2000
Pages:	247
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.24(d)

Table of Contents

1 Arde.- 2 A House by the Sea.- 3 On Fiddib Har.- 4 Walking to Is Felblt.- 5 City Below Ground.- 6 The Trek.- 7 The Punizlan Institute.- 8 Traveling on the Wind.- 9 High on Dahl Radam.- 10 Drabk the Sharak of Okbra.- 11 Higher Dimensions.- Ardean Science and Technology.- Acknowledgments.

Editorial Reviews

The Planiverse ... stretches our imagination by introducing a new and different kind of world. In the process, it changes the way we look at our own.

Discover Magazine

It's not everyone who gets to design a universe from scratch. But A.K. Dewdney has done just that.

The Boston Globe

Once you have been captivated by the two-dimensional Ardean world, the problems facing its difficult technology haunt you, begging for more solutions. Arde easily becomes a puzzle without end.
—The New York Times

Erik Sandberg-Diment

Computer scientist, mathematician, and contributor to "Scientific American", A. K. Dewdney's The Planiverse: Computer Contact With A Two-Dimensional World is a superbly crafted tale of discovery and community with the two-dimensional civilization of Arde, first published in 1984 and now brought back into print by Copernicus Books. The setting is 1981 and in the computer lab of a large university a group of graduate students and their professor are hard at work on the departmental mainframe, graphically modeling an imaginary two dimensional world. The project is proceeding very well when one student suddenly notices that the world they are building on-screen is inhabited! Although a work of pure fiction, it incorporates sound mathematics and principles of computer science. The Planiverse delights the reader's imagination while serving as a cautionary tale about the difficulties of communication between one totally alien world to another.

A worthy successor to Flatland
— Nature

Thomas Banchoff