Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
them. Thus, length and duration became consequences of the act of measur-
ing, not objective standards in and of themselves. Einstein argued that the
dilation of time was generated by the relative motion between an observer and
what he or she observed, a view that soundly rejected absolute time and space
because absolutes could only exist when they were being measured objectively.
Such a view challenged Newton's view of time and space and harked back
to Leibniz's relational space that was so “resoundingly defeated in the
Enlightenment” (Smith 2003:12). Relativity thus implied a return from object-
ive time and space to a vision that took the individual observer as its point of
departure. “According to Einstein, there is no privileged position from which
these can be measured with the assurance that the results represent the invari-
ant truth. Space, time and mass vary with the relative motion of the measurer,
or the observer” (Cardwell 1995:396). Like Cubism, relativity showed that
space was not simply what it appeared to be: “Cubism and relativity both
require one to pick out from nature particular aspects of it. Einstein's temporal
simultaneity matches Picasso's spatial one. Both amounted to representing
nature from several viewpoints at once” (Miller 2002:208).
Few
fields would be as revolutionized by this notion as astronomy. In the
1920s, Hubble discovered that the universe consisted of innumerable galaxies
(“island universes”) rapidly
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flying away from one another in all directions
(as ascertained by red shifts in their spectral signatures), a discovery redolent
of the Copernican revolution in its signi
fl
cance. Hubble's notion of a rapidly
expanding universe led to a widespread reassessment of just how big the
universe really was (and how ordinary and insigni
fi
cant our own planet was
in comparison), and indicated that it clearly had a beginning as well as an
end. If space now seemed in
fi
nite in extent, time seemed limited: far from
being endless, astronomical time had become
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finite (if enormous). Time, too,
was revolutionized: modernist science, particularly physics, long assumed the
existence of reversible time, in which the distinction between past and future
was irrelevant, in contrast to later views more sensitive to path-dependency
and irreversibility. Einstein's ideas became the dominant model for twentieth-
century science, and helped to open the door to relativist thought in many
other
fi
fields as well, including, ultimately postmodernism and various versions
of complexity theory.
fi
Geopolitics, World War I, and modern time-space
At the end of the nineteenth century, the exploration of uncharted realms (at
least, by Westerners) drew to a close with Peary's trip to the North Pole in
1909 and, two years later, Amundsen's arrival at the South Pole, and new
spaces for exploration were exhausted. Frederick Jackson Turner wrote that
the American frontier, that endless fount of individualism, had reached its
end. By the early twentieth century, it became increasingly apparent that the
total colonization of the earth had transformed imperialism into a zero-sum
game. Smith (2003) argues that the end of the colonial era was marked by the
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