Marianna Forleo’s scientific contributions

The discussion about the fourth dimension has been one of the most important issues in the theory of relativity, but it has been a topic also in the literary production, as scientific divulgation. Several writers have been interested in such a theme and one of the most representative texts regarding this issue is Flatland, a Romance of Many Dimensions, by Edwin Abbott. Written in 1884, it is a romance, a positive utopia and a mathematical game, metaphor of social and scientific issues. The use of a scientific language in such a literary piece has a strong evocative value and seems extremely coherent to the philosophical scientific debate on the concept of dimensionality. The text has many levels dealing with the complicated message of romance; the first and most evident of these levels is the description of the geometrical world juxtaposed with the flat. From a scientific point of view, in the "flat" world brightly described by Abbott "the cube on the fourth dimension walks on officially" and Flatland has been defined as "the best description of the fourth dimension"; nevertheless, the meaning of the told stories is not only to be seen in the divulgation of scientific theories, but above all, in the coexistence of these two worlds as a Cultural gap between two ages of thinking. On one hand it is like an indispensable, methodological standard of scientific examination; on the other hand, it considers knowledge in a broad, but not endless, context of application. Flatland reveals the dimensional - but above all intellectual - relativity of every situation: through a geometrical periphrasis it distinguishes the signs of a new culture among fixed falsehood. As a matter of fact, theories on fourth dimension and non Euclidean geometry have been one of the most shocking issue in the history of human thinking; literature's proper task is to elaborate and divulgate the new scientific concepts, usually explaining fourth dimension as a spatial or geometric variable. In this text, the assumption of the third dimension by a two-dimensional being implies a necessary loss of mathematical and philosophical absolute values in order to accept new categories of thinking, assuming complexity as essential tension among a new and an old epistemology.