Space, Representations of

Abstract

A representation of space is the set of coordinations between the spatial elements of a representation and those aspects of concrete phenomena thus represented. (The term was first introduced in Miller (2014), from which this entry draws.) It is useful in the construction of historical narratives about the physical sciences, since the category illuminates essential yet rarely explicit content of theories. The advent of classical (i.e., Newtonian) physics during the Scientific Revolution depended in part on a shift from the centered representation of space used in pre-modern natural philosophy to the oriented representation of space used in classical physics (Miller 2014; see also Jammer 1954; Koyré 1957).