Last night on the train, I was sitting next to a window with a thin slice of water trapped between its double panes. The subtlest lurching movement of the train sent waves crashing across my field of vision, all the way home. With the Red Hot Chili Peppers' By the Way sounding like a hymn-book, and looking through this window of waves, I thought about how this week I'd watched a man die.
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Last night's wave machine brings to mind A.K. Dewdney's wonderful book The Planiverse (a tribute of sorts to Edwin Abbot's classic Flatland), in which a class of computer science students make interdimensional contact with "Yendred", a young being in a two-dimensional universe. Yendred goes fishing with his father on a boat, and they get caught in a fierce storm. Here we learn that when limited to two dimensions, the vortices of turbulence are far more savage than their three-dimensional equivalents, having one less dimension into which they can dissipate. (As it happens, these vortices are illustrated on the book's current paperback cover on Amazon.) The Planiverse recovers your sense of wonder. How do you live technologically in a world in which you can't tie a knot? Or attach a wheel to an axle?
