CoursesCourse 22
Thinking about space: the loss of place
What is space? We feel it three ways: as a place we are in, as an emptiness that holds things, and as the size of things. This course follows those three ideas from Aristotle’s places and the atomists’ void, through Galileo, Descartes and Newton’s endless empty box, to the bucket, curved geometry and Einstein, and asks what was lost when a place became a point, and why so many modern people feel placeless.
Start lesson 1Lessons
- 1 Place, void and extensionIs space a place you are in, an emptiness that holds things, or the size of things? Three experiences of space, and how the Greeks argued over two of them.
- 2 From place to spaceHow Galileo, Descartes and Newton replaced Aristotle’s places with an endless, empty, measurable space, and why Newton needed God to hold it up.
- 3 What is real space?Newton’s bucket, Leibniz’s relations, Mach’s stars, three kinds of geometry and Einstein: can anyone say what space really is?
- 4 Back to placeWhat was lost when places became points: the fear of being out of place, of the endless void, and the case for returning to place, tested against a Chinese American neighborhood.
You’ll be able to
- Tell apart three experiences of space (place, void, extension) and say which theory of space each one suggests.
- Explain Aristotle’s idea of place and his case against the void, and how the Greek words for place carry a social meaning that Chinese 位 shares.
- Describe how Galileo, Descartes and Newton turned places into points in an endless, measurable, absolute space, and what Newton’s bucket was meant to prove.
- Weigh the critics (Leibniz, Berkeley, Mach, Poincaré, Einstein) and the modern literature on the loss of place, and judge for yourself how far “return to place” is a good answer.
About this course
This course covers 空间论：位置缺失与现代人的精神困境 (Thinking about space: the loss of place and the modern spiritual predicament), a philosophical history of the idea of space and a diagnosis of what it cost. It belongs with a group of courses on the worldviews behind modern science and technology, beside Cosmology: the starting point of philosophical thinking (Course 19) and Thinking about the Earth (Course 20). It stands on the astronomy and physics of The cosmos before Newton (Course 3) and Newton’s clockwork universe (Course 4), and it draws on Why science began in Greece (Course 1).
The argument leads, and much of it is philosophy, not settled science. Around it we add the history, checked against primary sources, the views of other scholars where they differ, and hands-on activities. Where a claim is a thesis of this course, such as the claim that modern space took the place of place and left people placeless, we say so, and set the strongest objections next to it.