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Sir James Jeans – The Mysterious Universe

It is conceivable that happenings entirely outside the continuum determine what we describe as the course of events inside the continuum, and that the apparent indeterminancy of nature may arise merely from our trying to force happenings which occur in many dimensions into a smaller number of dimensions.

Imagine, for instance, a race of blind worms, whose perceptions were limited to the two dimensional surface of the earth.  Now and then spots of the earth would sporadically become wet.  We, whose faculties range through three dimensions of space, call the phenomenon a rain shower and know that events in the third dimension of a space determine, absolutely and uniquely, which spots shall become wet and which remain dry.  But if the worms, unconscious even of the existence of the third dimension of space, tried to thrust all nature into their two dimensional framework, they would be unable to discover any determinism in the distribution of wet and dry spots; the worm-scientists would only be able to discuss the wetness and dryness of minute areas in terms of probabilities, which they would be tempted to treat as the ultimate truth.