My aim in this series of brief essays is to abridge for the specialist the main ideas from the book relating to physics and cosmology. Although not adhering strictly to the structure of the scientific paper, they are written in the same direct style, assuming prior knowledge of EA Abbott's Flatland. The geometrical principles enshrined within Edwin Abbott Abbott's 1884 work, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, are straightforward and consistent, and although Albert Einstein did not directly credit EA Abbott in Part III of his 1916 (popular) work Relativity, he deployed the little Flatlanders to great effect assuring us that 'the three-dimensional spherical space is quite analogous to the two-dimensional spherical surface'. In this series of 15 concise scientific essays we will follow through on the simplicity and consistency of Abbott's approach. Deriving from Flatland a set of named principles which are held to be true of the geometrical relationships between (n-1)D, nD, and (n+1)D [listed in Appendix 1], these are brought to bear on the contemporary scientific paradigm with the aim of exploring the potential for a consistent dimensional structure for the whole of nature. Flatland extrapolation through 1/2/3/4D reveals the action of the temporal dimension to be a product of the dimensional viewpoint of the observer; time is therefore not intrinsic to the 4th Dimension. The dimensional structure thus derived exists as a fundamental framework for all of nature, of which combinations of length, width, height, and time merely exhibit properties. Within this structure the universe emerges at the level of the 3rd Dimension (observable) and 4th Dimension (global), adhering strictly to Flatland principles applied spherically throughout. This model of the observable universe is the finite 3-sphere of Einstein, with the crucial difference that observer and origin are located at antipodal centres (poles) of the 3-hemispheres, rendering the whole 'observer-centric'. Without altering constants, GR, or QM, the model solves the horizon problem of CMB uniformity, explains the 1998 distant SNe Ia light anomaly, shows the universe to have net zero gravity (explaining so-called dark energy), reveals the correct mechanism behind expansion, shows in terms of information transfer why both gravity and light exist at c, describes the mechanism by which the universe diminishes to a Big Bang singularity, and provides a theoretical basis for the Equivalence principle. In the process it dispenses with infinity, superluminality, Cosmic Inflation, the G/DE knife-edge, recent acceleration, and the cosmological constant.
About the Author: Born in Edinburgh in 1957 my childhood was filled with reading, an early romance with Palaeontology and Astronomy culminating in the study of Maths and Physics at the University of Aberdeen (sadly not completed!) and a career in computing and design. In March 2012, I was struck quite suddenly by the (commonly recognised) idea of the 4th Dimension as a stacking-up of 3D snapshots of the 'moment now'. By a process of extensive reading, research, and intensive thinking this developed into the wholly original dimensional structure as abridged within these 15 essays, based firmly on the straightforward geometrical principles of EA Abbott's 1884 classic, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions.