Leibnizian Spacetime vs. Pincushion Owl
By: Joshua Glenn | Categories: Kudos, Uncanny Valley

owl

Over at Significant Objects today, Margaret Wertheim of the admirable Institute for Figuring tells a story about an owl-shaped pincushion and its role in the discovery that Leibniz was right to reject Newton’s notion of absolute space and time when he proposed that space and time have no a priori existence, but are byproducts of a universal set of relationships. Nice!

  • Share/Bookmark

About the author: Joshua Glenn

Joshua Glenn is a Boston, Mass.-based writer, editor, and cultural semiotics analyst. He's cofounder of HiLobrow (named by TIME one of the Best Blogs of 2010), Significant Objects, and Semionaut. He's been a columnist for the Boston Globe, the Observer (London), Feed.com, and the Idler; he's toiled as a magazine, website, and newspaper editor; and he's authored and edited Taking Things Seriously (2007) and The Idler's Glossary (2008). In the '90s he published the seminal intellectual/pop culture zine Hermenaut.

Read more from Joshua Glenn (323 posts) on Hilobrow.

Leave a Reply