Condensed matter physics in flatland

Adventures in Flatland In everyday life we think of most objects as having three dimensions. But what would life be like in a two-dimensional world? For one thing, it would be harder to move around. We could no longer step over things but would have to move around them. In 1884 Edwin Abbott published Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, under the pseudonym, A. Square, a satirical novella about social life in Victorian England. People are represented by geometrical objects. Men are represented by shapes such as triangles and hexagons. Women are represented by lines. The social status of men increases with the number sides that their shape has and how many of the sides are of the same length. Abbott’s book created limited interest and was largely forgotten by the 1920s. Interest revived when theoretical physicists started to think about worlds in different dimensions. This interest was stimulated by Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity, that proposed that we live in a…