Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and acknowledgements
- Part I Einstein's revolution
- Part II Philosophical progress
- 8 Who invented space?
- 9 Zeno's paradoxes: is motion impossible?
- 10 Philosophers at war: Newton vs. Leibniz
- 11 The philosophy of left and right
- 12 The unreality of time
- 13 General relativity: is space curved?
- 14 The fall of geometry: is mathematics certain?
- 15 The resurrection of absolutes
- 16 The resilience of space
- Part III Frontiers
- Appendix A Spacetime diagrams
- Appendix B Symmetry and Lorentz's minority interpretation
- Appendix C Simple formulas for special relativity
- Appendix D Websites
- Appendix E Guide to further reading
- Index
8 - Who invented space?
from Part II - Philosophical progress
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and acknowledgements
- Part I Einstein's revolution
- Part II Philosophical progress
- 8 Who invented space?
- 9 Zeno's paradoxes: is motion impossible?
- 10 Philosophers at war: Newton vs. Leibniz
- 11 The philosophy of left and right
- 12 The unreality of time
- 13 General relativity: is space curved?
- 14 The fall of geometry: is mathematics certain?
- 15 The resurrection of absolutes
- 16 The resilience of space
- Part III Frontiers
- Appendix A Spacetime diagrams
- Appendix B Symmetry and Lorentz's minority interpretation
- Appendix C Simple formulas for special relativity
- Appendix D Websites
- Appendix E Guide to further reading
- Index
Summary
Some 5,000 or 6,000 years ago, early societies living in Turkey and Armenia spoke Indo-European: the language from which modern European languages have descended. Their vocabulary for concrete objects and simple actions paints a vivid picture of prehistoric life: “bear”, “wolf ”, “monkey”, “wheat”, “apple”, “wheel”, “axle”, “tree”, “father”, “carry”, “see”, “know”, and so on. Words for less concrete aspects of the world were a long time coming. The adjective for “big” in Indo-European, for example, was “mega”: the root of our “megabyte”. This is an abstract word because it can apply to many different kinds of concrete objects; both bears and wheels can be big. Many centuries passed before humans were able to extend this to the very abstract concept of “bigness” or “size”: a general noun for an abstract quality. In Homer, who composed his poems about 3,000 years ago, the noun “bigness” (megathos) refers only to the height of human bodies; the word is still tethered to specific and concrete objects.
Several centuries later, there was a breakthrough when the philosopher Zeno of Elea (c.490-c.430BCE) used “bigness” to mean something like the expanse or dimensionality of all existence: that is, he began to liberate extension from concrete things. Each time the word was stretched, and each advance toward greater abstraction was a tiny victory for poetic genius, and contributed to the richness and power of our language today.
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- Information
- Space, Time and EinsteinAn Introduction, pp. 77 - 91Publisher: Acumen PublishingPrint publication year: 2002