SCHEMATIZING (42)

By: Joshua Glenn
August 20, 2024

One in a series of posts via which HILOBROW’S Josh Glenn will attempt to depict the intellectual and emotional highs and lows of developing a semiotic schema.

A depiction of Rene Descartes’ vortices, from Principia Philosophiae (1644). In his theory, the entire universe was filled with elements of different sizes which shifted around each other. At the center is the sun, which is made up of the smallest kind of element and the bigger ones sift out and circle around it. Space is entirely filled with matter in various states, whirling about the sun.

Each star denotes by F, D, etc. is at the center of a vortex. The Sun is denoted by S.

The notion of vortices was also used to explain forces like magnetism.

Importantly, the idea of the vortices suggested that the fixed stars were actually part of a contagious universe of systems like our own rubbing against each other. This notion that the stars are suns would play an important role in future development of cosmology.

Descartes’model was overruled by Newton’s theory planetary motion but, somehow, in contemporary astrophysics, vortices are still present — in a complete different way — and triggered by gravitational field acting through the interstellar vacuum.

I find this a really helpful and compelling way to envision how “local” semiospheres interact and intersect within a larger culture.

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SCHEMATIZING (42)

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