Friday, February 10, 2012

M.C. Escher and E.A. Abbott - Projection, Vision and Flatland

No one has played with our mind and sense of sight and explored how we see lines, curves, light and shadows like M.C. Escher. Even today Escher's infinite staircases seep into everything in modern culture, like maze designs in Inception. The drawings only make sense if you regard them just as projections rather than reality in 3 dimensions. This is a patent failing our senses have, we often mistake the perceived reality in 3 dimensions to be the actual reality which requires at least 4 dimensions according to Einstein, and even more according to the cabal of theoretical physicists seeking a unified theory of everything.

"The elimination of the logical inconsistencies [requires] rejection of our ordinary concepts of space and time, modifying them by some much deeper and nonevident concepts." - Matvei Petrovich Bronstein. Even a grand mind like Bronstein's cannot escape the vagaries of his time and escape from a firing squad. The ideas of conditional backgrounds and background independence are quite old. Including the mathematical and social treatment of dimensions by E.A. Abbott in "Flatland".

Let's hope "A Square" physicist in our 4-dimensional space-time land gets a revelation from a hyper-sphere and lays to rest the ghosts Einstein has conjured up from the manifolds of the universe.

1 comment:

Logiseek said...

This blog on Escher's staircase seems to be quite interesting. The concept of seeing drawing as projection rather than just 3D objects is something fascination. Well, knowing Raster to vector technology also proves to be beneficial in case you want to know more about 3d objects and stuff like that.