Leibnizian Spacetime vs. Pincushion Owl

By: Joshua Glenn
December 28, 2009

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!

Categories

Kudos, Sci-Fi, Uncanny