1. Why is there no color in Flatland? Abbot treats it as a "second nature," as paint, there seems to be something wrong with color in a flatland, and Abbot's depiction of color is of something superficial.
It seems that the basic objects in Flatland do not have color to begin with, but that it is possible to add color as an additional characteristic. I sometimes think that what Flatlanders call light is something more like heat. and the sensation that they call "Seeing" is more like infrared sensing of heat, in which case we usually do not think of 'different colors of heat". Does that give a different slant to the question?
2. What is the N,S,E,W, orientation of Flatland? I know how every Flatlander would have a sense of direction, but the South Pole (if there is one) seems to be a type of singularity at the center of Flatland. Is Flatland infinite? Is there a North Pole?
If we think of Flatland as some big coordinate plane with a horizontal and a vertical axis, then Northward indicates the direction along the vertical axis, without the necessity of postulating a "pole" as the limit to Northward movement. The actual shape of Flatland is never really addressed in the book, and there are alternative possibilities for the shape of this two-dimensional space. If we think of Flatland as some big coordinate plane with a horizontal and a vertical axis, then Northward indicates the direction along the vertical axis, without the necessity of postulating a "pole" as the limit to Northward movement. The actual shape of Flatland is never really addressed in the book, and there are alternative possibilities for the shape of this two-dimensional space.
3. What is "feeling" like in terms of texture of surfaces? Flatland reality > seems rather smooth and regular; besides angles, is everything else > "relatively" frictionless?
I agree that feeling wouldn't mean much without some notion of friction to provide a difference in textures that could be identified by a Flatlander examining some object in that flat sapace. It might be possible to investigate a two-dimensional world where friction was the most evident force that the beings have to content with, but that question is not addressed in the book at hand.
There are 32 edges to a hypercube.
True. Now, how do you see that?
Timothy Faulkner