Part 1:
OK, so I’ll bite.
But be warned, it’s way too long. Jim360 said it much more concisely
It’s a few years since I looked at this stuff, so my knowledge is not as cutting edge as it was – which is why I held off for a while. But seeing the answers from others, I think there may be some confusion about the terms, finite, bounded, closed and so on.
Much of this can only be fully described using multi-dimensional maths (second- or third year university level maths courses), but since I can no longer do that proficiently, and there are one or two people here who (I suspect) may not have the necessary mathematical background, I’ll do what I can without maths.
That’s unfortunate, because to understand it properly, you do need the maths, and anyone who claims they understand it without the mathematical background is probably exaggerating a little (that includes me, of course).
There are two aspects to this – the classical descriptions which rely on more or less conventional descriptions of the universe in multi-dimensional space. In classical descriptions, space is separate from time. And the relativistic descriptions that mix up space and time as different aspects of the same thing.
Let’s start with the classical descriptions.
We are all used to 3-dimensional space. Things have height, width and length. If you want to describe a point on the earth, such as the peak of a mountain, you can give the latitude, longitude and height above sea level, and that describes the point well enough for someone else to find it.
Mathematicians can use various equations and analytics to describe this 3-dimensional space (I’ll abbreviate that to a ‘3-space’) in all kinds of different ways.
The curious thing is that if you add a fourth, fifth or sixth spatial dimension to the equations, they still hold up. Things get a bit more difficult, but a mathematical description of a 5- space is not significantly different from our more familiar 3-space, except that you need five co-ordinates to describe each point in that space.
This kind of analysis is named Riemannian geometry after Bernhard Riemann, who invented it about 150 years ago.
Having sorted that out, let’s talk about Flatland.
Flat land is a thought-experiment in which a universe exists on a sheet of paper (or a larger flat surface). A 2-space.
It is inhabited by the Flatlanders. They can move left and right; forward and backward across the surface of the paper, but not upwards, out of the surface of the paper.
In fact, they have no concept of what ‘upwards’ might mean. (Rather like we have very little concept of what a fourth spatial dimension might look like). They know all about their 2-dimensional world, but the concept of what their world exists ’in’ is completely alien to them. It just exists – there is nothing outside of their own little universe.
If their world is a square sheet of elastic, then it is both finite and bounded. That is to say, the sheet has a specific (finite) area. It also has edges (boundaries).
If we (from our 3-dimensional position) now stretch that sheet of elastic around a large sphere and form perfect joins around the edges, the flatlanders now live on a large spherical surface.
So now the Flatland universe is finite (it has a limited area) but unbounded (no edges). If a Flatlander wishes to move in one direction, they can keep on going for ever, without meeting any kind of boundary. They will, eventually return to their starting point, and that will surely cause some confusion.
But if we make the sphere large enough – say bigger than the surface of the earth, or the diameter of the solar system, or the size of our galaxy, those Flatlanders can just keep on going without ever repeating the scenery. From our 3-space positions, we can see that the flatland universe is finite, but they cannot.
-Continued-