How Does Relativity Relate to Dimensionality?
These early 20th century thought adjustments show a definitive similarity to the ideas of dimensionality as studied in Math 8. The differences in physical behavior evidenced between dimensions is necessarily dependent on the idea of relative systems being equally valid. Just as flatlanders in two-dimensions completely understood their existence as a flat one, spheres in a three-dimensional world could understand their world as a round one. Neither view is right or wrong, one simply takes into account a different set of parameters than the other.
Thus, as dimesnionality can provide a window into a different field such as art, relativity influenced fields as varied as philosophy and religion. The Nazis viewed relativity, and Einstein, its Jewish discoverer, as a threat to their rigid and unequivocal understanding of humanity (Clark, 638). Many organized religions also viewed Einstein and his theory as a threat. Because Einstein saw relativity as a set of rules defined by a God "who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings, not...who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings," (Clark, 502), many clergy attacked him as atheistic. Many modern religions viewed God as an entity decidedly concerned about, and involved in, the most minute purposes and events of human affairs. Furthermore, the dominant Western Judeo-Christian belief in a monotheistic reality with defined rules of right and wrong, was one threatened by the idea that in some respects, there may be no absolutes, and, at the time of Einstein, no real way to reconcile relative realities.
Consequently, relativity, and its ideas about the geometrical and mathematical rules governing human existence, was an expansive and pluralistic one. Its challenge to multiple modes of non-scientific/non-mathematical thought demonstrated the essential links between perceptions of the physical universe and the spiritual universe. The door was now open to alternative thought systems, and the mathematical thinking represented in relativity was one which spoke to the fundamental question of how humanity understood the world around it, and what that meant for the way one lived oneีs life.