49

You know me even if you don’t think that you do. Call me Everyman.

I was born a long time ago in Plato’s Cave. It was a colorless, shadowy place. I never quite knew what was going on. The experience fed my curiosity. Since my early days, I’ve struggled to learn and understand more.

I escaped from the cave and fled to a land controlled by a blind watchmaker. Everything seemed orderly there, sensible, even planned. It only made sense if one assumed the existence of an omnipotent purpose-oriented creator. It was a magical place, charming and filled with love. But Copernicus destroyed it and I had to move again.

The heliocentric world was, despite the prominence of the sun, a cold one. It was predictable using simple algebra, geometry and a bit of calculus. The predictability of that world made it dull. I wished it would go away.

It did.

Einstein kept the sun in the middle but made everything relativistic and, well, odd. Length, speed, mass, time—it was hard to get a handle on it. I felt lost.

For awhile it got even crazier. Einstein was eclipsed by a giant hologram as I was teleported to a virtual world, a world that might be inside an alien computer. It was hard to know. But that didn’t last. Turned out to be nonsense.

Scientists suspected the reality of our world, of Everyman’s world, had to be simpler. They trimmed out the fat using a delicate tool called Occam’s Razor. All those extra dimensions were unnecessary. In fact, those other dimensions are illusory and the number of actual dimensions is two: length and width.

Yep. Now I’ve settled into Flatland. It’s cozy.