Avon Fantasy Reader No. 14 — page 37: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

“Oh,” said Tubby. “Jake says—” The professor paid no attention to the interruption. “I must explain about dimensions first. We are living, you understand, in a world of three dimen- sions.” “Length, breadth, an’ thickness,” Tubby elaborated promptly. The professor beamed. “Precisely. You Aave a scientific mind. I knew you had. Now to proceed. What is it has /ocation, but no dimensions?” “Search me,” said Tubby. “A point. And what has one dimension?” Tubby wrinkled his forehead, struggling to think. “I give it up,” he declared finally. “You teil.” “A line,” said the professor. “A line has only one dimension—length.” “So has time,” suggested Tubby. The professor smiled. “You will have your little joke, I see. You’re a clever man. I like clever men.” “Right,” said Tubby. “Go on to two dimensions.” “A square has two dimensions—or any plane figure. Also a shadow. And you and I have three dimensions—also almost everything else in the world about us.” Tubby nodded. “A table, for instance.” “Yes—a table. Now that brings us to the theory of stereoscopic vision. You understand that with one eye we can see only two dimensions—length and breadth, but no thickness. To put it more technically, with one eye there is no depth to the field of vision. The scene might just as well be painted on a piece of canvas. It is a little difficult to distinguish the difference at first, be- cause if you painted a scene in perfect perspective, life size and in full natural colors, even on a flat canvas it would look very realistic. There is a very great difference, however. Would you like a demonstration?” “Sure,” said Tubby. “Give me a demonstration.” The professor rose to his feet. “I have here two lead pencils. I am going to hang them in that beam of white light a few feet from you. Don’t look now.” Tubby covered his face. At the professor’s command he looked up with one eye, his hand holding the other closed. Hanging in the white light by invisible wires, were two lead pencils. “How far away are they?” the professor asked. “Bout ten feet,” Tubby estimated. “And which one is nearer to you?” Tubby indicated the right hand one, which was apparently about a foot in front of the other. The professor laughed. “Look with two eyes.” Tubby opened his other eye, and was amazed. He had assumed the lead pencils were of usual size. They weren’t. They were very much larger, and they were hanging at least twenty feet away from him. He had also assumed they were equal in size. But in that he was also mistaken. The right hand one was larger than its mate, and instead of being in front was exactly beside at, “You see,” said the professor, “everything looks flat. There is no depth to comicbooks.com a