Concepts of Space: The History of Theories of Space in Physics

by Max Jammer

Although the concept of space is of fundamental importance in both physics and philosophy, until the publication of this book, the idea of space had never been treated in terms of its historical development. It remained for Dr. Jammer, noted scholar and historian of science, to trace the evolution of the idea of space in this comprehensive, thought-provoking study. The focus of the book is on physical, rather than metaphysical, ideas of space; however, philosophical or theological speculations are discussed when relevant. The author has also given special attention to the cultural settings in which the theories developed.
Following a Foreword by Albert Einstein and an introductory chapter on the concept of space in antiquity, subsequent chapters consider Judaeo-Christian ideas about space, the emancipation of the space concept from Aristotelianism, Newton's concept of absolute space and the concept of space from the eighteenth century to the present. For this third edition, Dr. Jammer has contributed an extensive new chapter six, reviewing the numerous and profound changes in the philosophy of space since the publication of the second edition.
An abundance of meticulously documented quotations from original sources and numerous bibliographic references make this an exceptionally well-documented book. It is essential reading for philosophers, physicists, and mathematicians, but even nonprofessional readers will find it accessible.

Genres: Science, Philosophy, Physics, History, History Of Science

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1954

Reviews

[Clare · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm going to go out on a limb and agree with Albert Einstein's assessment of this book: interesting, crucially important, but sometimes incorrect in some aspects of its conceptual framing.

The project Jammer takes on in this book is nothing less than a complete accounting of the history of the concept of space in Western civilization. This is brilliant. At the time when Jammer wrote this book, there was little thought given to how abstract concepts like this evolve over time, in part because there was little recognition that they do evolve at all. As Einstein notes in the introduction, scientists tend to think that the concepts they have in their own minds are the same as the objective reality... or at least that their personal concepts of abstractions are the same concepts as others have and have always had.

Jammer begins by pushing back on this idea that abstract concepts are universal and stable over time. He discusses two different concepts of space: space as "place," and space as "container." The first is defined as the relation of material objects to one another, such as the ordering of houses on a street. Jammer argues this is the psychologically and historically most fundamental concept of space, preceding the development of the second concept. If this material-ordering conception of space is developed out far enough, it resists the existence of void, or empty space, which becomes relevant to more modern debates within physics. The second concept of space -- space as container -- takes an abstraction (the physical relation of matter to other matter) and makes it into a property that has existence in and of itself. Under this conception, empty space is not only possible, but perhaps the most pure form of space that is then filled in with matter. This conception gives rise to Euclidian views of space, but also allows for the development of Newton's laws of motion. In the first concept, matter is fundamental and space is relegated to a property of matter. In the second, space is fundamental, and matter simply exists within space.

The first quibble I have with Jammer is over his claim that the first conception of space ("place") psychologically and historically precedes the development of the second concept of space as container. As Einstein points out, while the distinction is critically relevant, even the ancient Atomists (some of the earliest philosophers to systematically deal with the concept of space) needed to have both concepts in play simultaneously: atoms have extension and many of the observable features of the world arise because of atoms physical relation to one another, but atoms also need to move within space viewed as a container. Jammer has them listed as falling wholly into the "place" conception of space, focusing in on their discussion of extension and relation, while ignoring the fact that their philosophy necessarily requires the existence of space as container, even if they don't explicitly state that in the remaining records we have.

I believe Jammer falls prey to two limitations of his historical approach: he draws too hard of a conclusion from limited resources and he prioritizes his conceptual framework over the historical evidence on hand. Because Jammer goes so far back in time, many of the records from the earliest eras he examines, some 2,000+ years ago, have been lost to time. Given the fact that the resources he's dealing with are so limited, it seems like too far of a stretch to say positively that the first conception of space is more fundamental than the second. We just don't know. And while I believe Jammer's conceptual framework of space-as-place/space-as-container is largely correct, he often tries to fit various philosophers and scientists into one category or the other, when the truth may be more complex than that. So while I think Jammer's overall argument is convincing, his historian's impulse to impose an ex post facto interpretive framework on historical particularities drives me a little crazy.

From his conceptual starting point, Jammer takes the reader through time, following the development of the two concepts of space from the most ancient pre-scientific eras, through the middle ages and the influence of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity, to the early modern area, and finally to the mid-20th century. It's a good overview, highly interesting and informative, although a little hard to follow with Jammer's writing style, which is both hyper-academic and oddly stream of conscious, sometimes ordering information chronologically and other times following conceptual threads across time before jumping back to pick up the chronological approach. I'm no stranger to academic writing, but this text strikes me as unnecessarily abstruse.

Which brings me to the issue of translation. Or lack thereof. To give Jammer the benefit of the doubt, I believe he included untranslated excerpts of original documents both because he believed this would best preserve the original meaning of the text and, likely, because that's what he had available to him in the more limited pre-internet age. However, untranslated text amounts to maybe 1/4th of the total content of this book. I was able to read most of the French and could sort of patch together the Latin, but it was a slog. Greek, German, and Hebrew were pretty much totally indecipherable for me. Frankly, I don't know anyone who reads all five of those languages, so it's likely that a good deal of this book will be lost on anyone without truly extensive linguistic skills, particularly since Jammer doesn't even summarize the untranslated content. It was frustrating to continually feel as though I was missing crucial information.

All that said, this is still a very important work, in part because it helped to start a movement within science that began taking the historical and cultural context of science seriously. It also brought abstract concepts to the foreground in a field that is so often narrowly focused on empirical particularities as if all of truth can be built up from observations and equations alone. The overarching value of this work is that it highlights how abstract concepts drive our quest for knowledge, shape the questions we ask and the methods we use to answer them, and provide a framework for how we interpret our observations of the world around us. For me, a lover of the abstract realm, this is spreading the gospel to the world.

[William Bies · Rating 3 out of 5]

What is self-evident to any scholar in the humanities—that any large concept is sure to be greatly illuminated by the documentary study of its history, even if its present-day significance cannot be reduced to a genealogical explanation—can hardly be said to have impinged upon the consciousness of natural scientists, to judge by their research practices. Today’s practicing scientist confines himself to a horizon in time reaching back scarcely more than ten years into the past, anything from before then being known to him only through a retrospective caricature to be found in the currently prevailing textbooks. The highly regarded historian of science Max Jammer, however, has made it his project to rectify an abuse such as this. In the present volume, he reviews the history of theories of space in physics going back to antiquity. In a thoughtful foreword from 1953, Albert Einstein expresses his approval and sketches the main outlines to be considered: is space to be regarded as a positional quality of material bodies, or as a container or receptacle for them? In Einstein’s judgment, the victory of the latter view at the hands of Galileo and Newton was a necessary step and only the rise of the field concept during the course of the nineteenth century enabled physicists to overturn absolute space and to arrive at the modern view.

Jammer himself, though, has his own agenda to pursue in what is, after all, his work! Jammer is at his scholarly best—and at his best he can be a formidable historical critic—in his treatment of the concept of space in antiquity and its subsequent development through to the inception of classical mechanics in the seventeenth century, including the impact of Judaeo-Christian ideas during the medieval period. The reader will find ample discussions of the Pythagoreans, pre-Socratics, Plato and Aristotle. An interesting point, not generally known, is that in this early period there scarcely existed a clear conceptual distinction between the physics and the mathematics, not until, at the earliest, Plato’s dialogue, the Gorgias. Plato himself seems to have identified matter, in some sense, with empty space, physical bodies being equated with the geometrical forms or surfaces bounding the empty space occupied by matter. Jammer’s summary view is that Greek mathematics proper never got beyond a disregard of the geometry of space itself.

What this reviewer finds most engaging is Jammer’s account in chapters two and three of the emancipation from Aristotelianism, which took place from late antiquity through the early modern period. Principal players include not just the Neoplatonists and John Philoponus, whom one might expect, but also the Arabic kalam school and medieval Jewish kabbalah, as well as various Latin Christians like Nicholas of Cusa and the Cambridge Platonists under Henry More. One wishes Jammer could have devoted more space, perhaps even a separate monograph, to an analysis of the theological and mystical antecedents to the decisive emergence of the modern view of the priority of absolute space over matter in Patritius towards the close of the sixteenth century.

What comes next, in chapter four, is an able account of standard material on the views of Galileo, Descartes, Newton and Leibniz through to Kant, Gauss, Riemann, Helmholtz, Mach and Poincare in chapter five. No great surprises here, though. Perhaps Jammer’s heart is really with the ancients and the pre-moderns; here, he fails to achieve as much conceptual clarity as he did in earlier chapters in the delineation of the critical stations along the way from Newton to Einstein’s general theory of relativity. For instance, Johann Herbart merits mention only in passing as an influence on Riemann, without any statement of how. Similarly, it seems that, in a book purportedly on the history of theories of space in physics per se, Mach and Einstein get short shrift.

Jammer’s exposition degenerates noticeably in quality after his discussion of Einstein and Mach, in what may be a problem endemic to all writing on the history of science. It is only to be expected that as one approaches the present day, it becomes more and more difficult to sift out whose work is truly fundamental, and whose is merely time-bound and ephemeral. From today’s vantage-point, Jammer cannot be said to show any prescience in the publications he chooses to call out for comment. This complaint holds particularly for the 35-page addendum on recent developments that was added for the third, enlarged Dover reprint edition published in 1993. Here, Jammer loses all perspective and becomes almost incoherent. The reason for this failing can most likely be put down to the circumstance that, while Jammer, of course, knows his philosophy cold and older science very well, too, he is not technically adept enough to keep abreast of the state of the art on the research frontier, involving such things as quantum field theory, quantum gravity, string theory, non-commutative geometry and other speculations. As a result, the final chapter ends up being rather a disappointment, so much so that it might just as well never have been written. The most one can get out of it are the names of some second-rate philosophers of science and their typical concerns.

Jammer’s Concepts of Space will certainly be worth the effort of reading it for its first half. Meanwhile, as we have indicated, he leaves plenty for future historians of science to do. Perhaps we can look to Amos Funkenstein’s notable Theology and the Scientific Imagination to carry on the torch; keep posted!

[Douglas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting but flawed by the numerous untranslated quotes from several languages including Latin, French, Greek, etc. Would have been nicer if they were translated.

[Allan Olley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an comprehensive summary of concepts of space (up to the 1950s when it was written) that have been used in physics including some of the natural philosophic ideas of the ancient and medieval thinker. Almost half the book deals with ideas of Aristotle, the ancient atomists, medieval theologians and cabalists, but to a great extent these just prepare background for the more technically substantive ideas and theories of Newton and other early modern thinkers. This means that the second half of the book crams in a lot of thinkers, physicists and mathematicians whose ideas probably merit longer consideration, but on the other hand given the limited level of technical detail and the technical intensity of later thinkers this was probably inevitable.

The book is interesting both for the historical background and ideas it presents and the analysis implicit in that presentation. Also of interest is the book's foreword by Albert Einstein which although very brief gives some sense of Einstein's mature thoughts on the nature of space. The account seems a little overly partial to the Ernst Mach and perhaps over emphasizes the importance say of Mach's Principle (the attempt to explain inertial factors by some influence of other bodies rather than separate properties of space). Some of the technical material can be abstruse and the short treatment given in it can be unenlightening, there are a few equations in the text, but no complex derivations are attempted and so the loss from failing to understand them is limited.

This 1960 Torchbook edition contains a 5 page appendix on the recently discovered violation of parity conservation in particle physics (some experiments reveal that left and right are not symmetric in certain particle decay processes), the summary succeeds in briefly describing the developments, but offers little insight or even a particularly clear contextualization of the event relative to other concepts discussed in this book.