An introduction to the Stanford Multidisciplinary Multimedia Meeting of Arts, Science and Humanities on Space of October 10, 2012 (download the pdf from http://www.scaruffi.com/stanford/space.pdf )

1. sPaCe
for the SMMMASH! of October 18, 2012
www.smmmash.com
piero scaruffi
www.scaruffi.com
(download the most recent version from
scaruffi.com/know/space.pdf )

2. Space is boring…
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3. …or the other way around?
Vladimir: "It passed the time"
Estragon: "Time would have passed anyway"
(Samuel Beckett, "Waiting for Godot")
The history of human civilization has been more
about Space than about Time (until very recently)
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4. Zenon’s paradox (5th c BC)
• Motion between two points requires going through
an infinite number of points, which requires an
infinite amount of time
t0
t1
t2
The fastest runner in the world will never overtake the slowest turtle: by the time the
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runner reaches the point where the turtle is, the turtles has moved further away.

5. Demokritos/ Democritus
• Everything is made of atoms
• Nothing lies between atoms
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6. Aristoteles/ Aristotle
• The universe is full and finite
• The void cannot exist
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7. Eukleides/ Euclid (300 BC)
• Geometry
• Postulates (parallel lines)
• A theory of space
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8. The most important place:
Paradise
• Gilgamesh, Zoroaster, Bible, Buddha: the garden
is the site of eternal life - horizontal space
Western Paradise of the Buddha
Amitabha (British Museum)
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Zoroastrian fire temple in Yazd

9. Paradise
• Middle Ages: paradise is in heaven - vertical space
Simon Marmion: Livre des sept Ceiling of Mogao Cave No. 285,
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âges du monde Dunhuang

10. Vertical Space
Chartres (12th c)
Houssein mosque,
Cairo (12th c)
Angkor
Liurong Si,
Guangzhou (11th c)
Nataraja temple,
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Chidambaram

11. Ordered Space
Firenze, Italy (1438) Machu Picchu, 11 (1472)
Peru

12. Rinascimento/ Renaissance
• Piero della Francesca’s age (1480)
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13. Distant Space
• Long-distance travelers
– Marco Polo (13th c)
– Ibn Battuta (14th c)
– Zheng He (15th c)
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14. America
• Giovanni-Matteo Contarini: first map to show
America (1506)
North America
(part of China)
West Indies
South America
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15. Cosmic Space
• Copernicus (1530): the Earth is not
the center of space
• Galileo (1632): the celestial world
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16. Cosmic Space
• Descartes (1637): space and geometry are
computable
• Descartes: space is full of matter - if there
is no matter, there is no space
• Von Guericke (1650) & Boyle (1659):
the vacuum
• Huygens (1678): an “aether gas"
permeates all space (needed to explain
how light propagates in space)
• Newton (1687): absolute space - empty,
infinite and immutable
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17. Immanuel Kant (1781)
• Space is in our mind
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18. Non-Euclidean Geometry
• The nature of parallel lines
• Space can be curved
• 1824: Carl Friedrich Gauss
• 1830s: János Bolyai and Ivanovich Lobachevsky
• 1854: Bernhard Riemann
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19. Non-Euclidean Art
• Violations of the law of perspective Turner’s blurred nature
• Emancipation of color: color
becomes “the” space
• Impressionism: the real subject is the
brush stroke itself (the very fabric of
space)
Manet’s curved horizon Monet’s abstract space
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20. Travel
• Steamship
• Train
• Airplane
• Automobile
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21. Long-distance Communications
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22. Einstein
• The aether is unnecessary
• Space is not absolute
• Hermann Minkowski: spacetime
• General relativity: spacetime and matter interact
(“curved space”)
• Spacetime is not just a stage but an actor in the
story of the universe
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23. Quantum Mechanics
• The Planck distance, the minimum distance
between two “things”
• The quantum vacuum
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24. Cubism
• Braque: a new language of space (space is discrete
and empty space matters) - quantum art
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25. Suprematism
• Kazimir Malevich’s “White on White” (1918)
– “It is not an empty square… it is full of the
absence of any object”
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26. Surrealism
• Surrealism
– Distortion of space and time
Magritte
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Tanguy

27. Modern Space
• Edwin Hubble: The universe is expanding in all
directions (and the expansion is accelerating)
• Superstring Theory: 10 or 26 dimensions
• Higgs Field: it permeates and creates our universe
• Lee Smolin: A volume cannot be divided forever
-there is an elementary unit of volume (also Roger
Penrose's spin networks)
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28. Modern Space
• Sputnik
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29. Modern Space
• Moon Landing
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30. Modern Space
• Skyscrapers
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31. Non-human (post-human?) Space
• Voyager
• Mars Rover
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32. Cyberspace
• Reality is not real but virtual
• The word "distance“ becomes meaningless
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33. Space and Life
• Life without Time? Many people would like it (no
aging!)
• Life without Space? Life without my favorite
park, beach, cafe, library, museum…? Hmmm…
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34. Space is not boring
• Space is
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