MEASURING TIME AND SPACE

Perhaps the greatest difference between the way the sixteenth century studied the curiosities of the world and the way we do is the degree to which we measure all phenomena and the uses to which we put these measurements. Instead of looking at an object as a whole, considering its pattern and similarity to other objects, we tend to dissect the object and measure its parts. What and how we measure varies from discipline to discipline, although these calculations usually proceed along the axes of time and space. Nonetheless, how each field thinks about time and space, or what it is most interested in discovering, can seem completely foreign from the perspective of other fields. What one field finds incredibly old will seem to another trivially recent; what is near or distant to a particle physicist is insignificant to a geographer. Meaning and measurement lie in the trained eye of the beholder. A series of images of and samples from the Santa Cruz Island was used to illustrate this point, ranging from a satellite photograph down to an electron microscope photograph.

A similar point was made about the measurement of time with our case of "firsts," which included rocks dating back to the birth of the planet, fossils of the first hominids, and first editions of books. The question of origins is important in nearly every discipline, and tends to be the subject of much debate. Even the most seemingly absolute and objective categories are relative and unstable, such as the idea of the "first," a category that takes on an inflated and perhaps contradictory presence in an evolutionary paradigm. What is "earliest" today may just be another signpost along that evolutionary road tomorrow--still important, but no longer the first.