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Product Description
What do we mean by the word ‘space’? This seemingly basic concept – a partner to ‘time’ in science’s description of the world – has meant different things to different people in different eras. In this ground-breaking book, Margaret Wertheim traces the history of Western thinking about space from the Middle Ages through the rise of modern science, and finally on to the concept of ‘cyberspace’ which underlies the emerging technologies of ‘virtual’ worlds and the so-called ‘metaverse.’
Prior to the scientific revolution, Europeans saw humanity as existing at the center of an angel-filled cosmos with everything connected to God. But in the 16th and 17th centuries a radical transformation occurred in our thinking about the cosmological scheme in which we humans are embedded. We shifted from seeing ourselves at the center of the universe to being the inhabitants of a small chunk of rock orbiting around a mundane star in a potentially infinite void. First came the revolutionary ideas of Descartes, Galileo and Newton, whose conception of space as a geometric void set the stage for the emergence of modern physics. Then, in the 20th century, this simple description was replaced by Einstein’s relativistic ‘spacetime,’ and then a vision of space as a 10- or 11-dimensional matrix in which everything, including matter, is enfolded.
Wertheim argues that as concepts of space change, so too does our conception of what it means to be a human ‘self.’ The book reveals how indeed concepts of space and concepts of self are inextricably entwined, and that how we see our selves is intimately bound up with the question of how we understand where we are in space.
In the final section of the book, she turns her attention to cyberspace and asks how this new development reflects on our understanding of personhood today. Here, she suggests, we are seeing a return to a kind of medieval dualism in which physical space is regarded as just one aspect of the real. Now, as we increasingly engage with virtual spaces, we are directly experiencing something other than the space of material being. For some people this non-physical space is being cast as a new area for spiritual experience; a claim Wertheim examines and finally rejects.
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