Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, by Edwin Abbott Abbott, is an absolutely required prerequisite for this course.
For the first month’s exercise of this journey, read Flatland. You may read it once throughout the month and contemplate on it as often as you can, or read it multiple times throughout the month. At the end of the month, write a one page (and only one page) paper on how Flatland affected you. Try not to repeat much of what Abbott states in Flatland. Instead, focus entirely on an inner reflection of how the book and the concepts contained therein affected you specifically. This exercise you will repeat at the end of every month after each section of the abridged version of My Big TOE. It is this exercise that will provide the greatest insights into your personal paradigm shifts throughout the two year course.
The book Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, by Edwin Abbott Abbott, can be found in almost any library, can be purchased from almost any book sellers, and can be obtained on line for free from several sources. This link at Project Gutenberg is one of the free accesses to the book.
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/201
A definite prerequisite to any study of Thomas Campbell’s My Big TOE, is Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, by Edwin Abbott Abbott. It was written in 1884 as an introduction to the notion of higher dimensions and a satire of Victorian society and norms. During Abbott’s life, Flatland was not recognized as the classic it has become. When it was published, it received mixed reviews and not much success. As noted in Wikipedia, “In the entry on Edwin Abbott in the Dictionary of National Biography for persons who died in the period of 1922 to 1930, Flatland was not even mentioned. Flatland was reborn and started a new path of popularity with Albert Einstein’s mention of the concept of a fourth dimension, which he identified as time, within his theory of Special Relativity in 1905, and then grew in popularity with the emergence of quantum physics in the 1920’s. It is now mostly considered required reading among students of many disciplines, including physics, mathematics, philosophy, science fiction literature, etc., and is considered a masterpiece by many.
My Big TOE requires readers to stretch their minds several times, well beyond its current boundaries. Reading Flatland provides the initial exercise that loosens the rigid mind, and allows it to be stretched. As Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. expressed, “A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.”