And so it’s basic common sense to us that space has this structure. And so you can think about it in terms of mathematics, but you can’t conceive more than these three coordinates sensuously. A four-dimensional square! But the tesseract, you see-the minute you draw it, that obviously you can’t have more than the three right angular dimensions of space, or the coordinates, in any kind of solid figure that you know. And “tesseract” is a good word to apply to a person who is ultimately square. You can draw-it’s great fun to draw-a four-dimensional cube having four spatial dimensions it’s called a tesseract. But you can’t conceive it in your imagination. That is to say, you can write it down as if it were so. We can mathematically conceive spaces with infinitely many dimensions. Augustine was asked, “What is time?” he said, “I know what it is, but when you ask me I don’t.” Now, the fascination about space and time is that, while they are basic to all possible experiences that we have, you just can’t put your finger on them. ![]() And, by the way, also we experience everything not only in the dimension of space, but also in the dimension of time. But it is against space that we experience everything that we experience. We can think of that in terms of space and measure it in terms of space. And, after all, there is space between the two sides, shall we say-or ends-of the solid. You can shift a solid around in space without apparently altering it in any way. And yet, the funny thing about space is that, in a way, it doesn’t end where a solid begins. And even a blind person has a sense of space in that which does not obstruct motion. And, after all, it is the background against which we see everything. They increased the distance-the distance now being the object of the verb, whereas before it was the subject.Īnd so, at once one begins to see there’s something fishy about space. But then you suddenly find that you’ve got distance as an object. But I suppose what we’re actually saying is that the two bodies we’re talking about increased the distance between themselves. In other words, when we say the distance between them increased, as if the distance were a substantive that does something-like: the man walked, the distance increased. It’s the way we have, in other words, of talking about distances between bodies. But since the Michelson-Morley experiment, which seemed to prove conclusively that there wasn’t any such thing as ether (some kind of attenuated fluid through which light was propagated), space just isn’t there. ![]() But once you get outside the air, space may be in some way crossed by floating bodies, by various kinds of electrical vibrations-light waves, cosmic rays, et cetera. And in most people’s minds space is just nothing unless it’s filled with air. I suppose you may think it rather nervy of me to devote this whole seminar to talking about nothing.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |