Usually in the vacations I go to a conference or workshop. Easter 2009 was no exception to this rule, but instead of going to something medieval, I found myself in a corner of BritGrav 2009 at Cardiff – a meeting of those people who devote themselves to the study of gravitation, general relativity and other similar things. I was, of course, there with Reivers in case anyone thinks I’m planning a radical career change.
I have to admit at this stage that I did not attend the sessions in the day time, but either wondered around museums and monuments in Cardiff or sat in the Physics common room copy editing. I did, however, attend the public lecture (alongside Reivers and his colleagues) given by Prof. Kip Thorne on ‘The warped side of the universe’. This was absolutely fascinating and I even understood some of it. I have long been interested in the universe and deep space, even before I met Reivers, so the opportunity to hear one of the leading experts in the field who has a real gift for communication was too good an opportunity to miss.
Even though I understood some of the lecture though, I don’t think I can explain it here – I’ll leave that to Reivers – but what I did find was that my historical work helped in my understanding of the pictures and representations of various phenomena Prof. Thorne was explaining to us. I work on the use of space in the middle ages, which includes thinking about how people who wrote our sources or built abbeys, castles, houses, roads, bridges, etc. thought about and represented these spaces, as well as how people used and experience them. This is something that is key in explaining relativity and gravitation: how do you represent a black hole? What projections do you use? Where is the event horizon? How do you show time and space in a 2-d image? More recently, I’ve been thinking about space cartographically and the links between pictures of black holes as seen from hyperspace and mappae mundi were oddly striking.
The lecture also confirmed something I have long suspected: relativists are just a different type of historian, but don’t tell Reivers!
[...] May 10, 2009 Posted by gesta in Boundaries, Debate, Medieval, Uncategorized. trackback In my last post I commented on how the problems faced by relativists trying to show time and space in [...]
[...] The nominal topic of this blog is boundaries, especially the boundaries between scientific and humanistic ways of thinking about life and scholarship. We are also interested in ways in which aspects of our own life cross boundaries. You’ll find one under faith at the end of this post, but here faith, the middle ages and modern life all collide. Reivers has been known to blog about the past, in this case King Alfred, and I’ve occasionally ventured into the realms of science. [...]