John Edward Huth's "A Sense of Space"

John Edward Huth is the Donner Professor of Science at Harvard University. He has done research in experimental particle physics since 1980 and is currently a member of the ATLAS collaboration at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN). He participated in the discovery of the top quark and the Higgs boson and is the author of The Lost Art of Finding Our Way.

Huth applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, A Sense of Space: A Local's Guide to a Flat Earth, the Edge of the Cosmos, and Other Curious Places, with the following results:

Page 99 in A Sense of Space is the close of chapter 5 on spatial and cultural/social connections in Dante's Divine Comedy. It represents a segue from the end of that chapter to the next chapter on the concept of extraterrestrial intelligence that emerged with the invention of the telescope.

Here force failed my high fantasy; but my
desire and will were moved already—like
a wheel revolving uniformly—by
the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.

(Par. 33 133–45)

Here, we have the final writing of le stelle.

Three centuries after Dante, the telescope was invented and revealed structures associated with the planets, like the rings of Saturn, phases of Venus, and the moons of Jupiter. Observations triumphed where pure reason could not solve riddles, which spelled the end of Aristotle’smodel of space.

But our inclination to project human-like qualities onto space persisted. Where Dante populated the heavens with virtuous souls, some astronomers contemplate whether the universe could be home to intelligent beings like us.

This captures the theme of the book quite well: that social concepts are interwoven with spatial concepts. Here is an additional detail. Dante was very taken by astronomy, and the last word(s) in each of the books (Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso) is "the stars" (le stelle). I wove this into A Sense of Space as well. The first words are "the stars" in my preface and "the stars" at the end of the concluding chapter. Stars also feature prominently throughout the book in various guises: Ancient Greek astronomy, astrology, cosmology, and the fundamental forces of nature.

The book examines the interplay between visions of space and associated social/cultural manifestations over the eons from the Ancient Egyptians to modern physics and cosmology. I lead off with the cognitive psychology underpinning the interplay. Dante adopts Aristotle's model of the universe, with the earth at the center and spheres of the moon, sun, and planets in the heavens surrounding. I explore his spatial/cultural connections in the context of the Divine Comedy. Likewise the astronomers later speculated on whether the planets were home to intelligent beings. HG Wells, partly inspired by an astronomy report of a strange light from Mars, wrote War of the Worlds, which was a jump-off point of our modern culture of extraterrestrial aliens.

Learn more about A Sense of Space at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue