clifford_a-_pickover_surfing_through_hyperspacebookfi-org

SATAN AND PERPENDICULAR WORLDS 57
Satan is the ruler over the fallen angels, always struggling against the
Kingdom of God by seducing humans to sin. Satan disrupts God's plan
for salvation and slanders the saints to reduce the number of those chosen
for the Kingdom of God. How might Satan do this from delta below
our 3-D world? If he could occasionally pop up into our world, he would
wreak havoc!"
"Of course, we're only talking about metaphors here. But this would
explain our encounter at Cherbourg. We saw pulsating bags of skin when
a 4-D creature came into our world."
Sally leans forward. "Was that Satan at Cherbourg?"
"That's what we're here to find out. I think it was an Omegamorph.
Lots of mysterious things are going on these days in Cherbourg and
around Washington, D.C. Nothing is certain. I already mentioned that if
we fell through Flatland, the Flatlanders would see pulsating, pancakelike
blobs of skin as we intersected their world. When our mouths intersected
Flatland, Flatlanders might get a glimpse of the edge of our
tongues, which would be like bumpy pink shapes to them. When our
heads fell through, they'd see the edges of a hairy pancake" (Fig. 3.3).
"What would it look like to be lifted upsilon into the fourth dimension?"
"Sally, think of a 3-D creature pulling on a 2-D square. If the square
were slowly peeled from the 2-D world, part of the square would remain
in the plane for a time. Similarly, if a 4-D creature lifted you from the 3-
D world, your head might disappear while your body remained. And
then you would be entirely lifted from the world."
"One thing is bothering me."
"Just one?"
"I understand that a 4-D being should be able to glimpse into our
guts, see the valves of our heart, and so forth, but what might their eyes
be like? How would their eyes function?"
"Sally, our own retina is essentially a 2-D disc of rods and cones—the
two kinds of nerve cells for vision. By analogy, a 4-D creature would have
a retina that was a sphere of nerve endings."
"How would an Omegamorph see with a spherical retina?"
"When you look at a circle moving in Flatland, your 2-D retina captures
a circular pattern impinging on the nerve cells. Each point in the
circle corresponds to a light ray from the circle to a single point in your
retina. If you are looking from above, each ray goes up to your eye. If a 4-