Nearly one hundred years ago, when Albert Einstein was merely a child and his ideas about time and space were wholly unexplored, a distinguished English headmaster, Edwin A. Abbott, wrote a strange little book titled Flatlands. It portrayed a peculiar world of two dimensions: a world that had length and breadth, but no height; a world of surfaces in which neither from desire nor necessity did its citizens ever look up.

Now, to us, the whole idea seems very odd, but on second thought the point becomes poignantly clear, especially when we ask ourselves this question: how many people today actually live in a two-dimensional world? Theirs is a world merely of surfaces, and they very much remind us of a remark made once by Lynn Harold Hough of Drew University about a great European house of ente…