Pearly Gates Of Cyberspace [Paperback]

In Pythagoras' Trousers, science writer and feminist Margaret Wertheim took an astute look at the social and cultural history of physics. She explored how the development of physics became intertwined with the rising power of institutionalized religion, and how both of these predominantly masculine pursuits have influenced women's ability to join the physics community. Now she has turned her attention to virtual reality, looking at similarities between how we view it today and how art and religion was viewed in medieval times. Her assertion is that rather than carrying us forward into new and fabulous other worlds, virtual reality is actually carrying us backwards--to essentially medieval dreams. Beginning with the medieval view, with its definition of the world as spiritual space, Wertheim traces the emergence of modern physics' emphasis on physical space. She then presents her thesis: that cyberspace, which is an outgrowth of modern science, posits the existence of a genuine yet immaterial world in which people are invited to commune in a nonbodily fashion, just as medieval theology brought intangible souls together in heaven. The perfect realm awaits, we are told, not behind the pearly gates but the electronic gateways labeled .com and .net. How did we get from seeing ourselves in soul space (the world of Dante and the late medievals) to seeing ourselves as purely in body space (the world of Newton and Einstein)? This crucial transition and the new shift propelled by the Internet are convincingly described in this challenging book. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

In this serious and intriguing, if far-fetched, study, Wertheim (Pythagoras' Trousers) argues that cyberspace gives us "a technological substitute for the Christian space of Heaven." She explains that early Christians hoped to trade "the troubled material world" for the next one, where bodies would be perfected or disappear and "injustice and squalor" would vanish. Internet partisans make similar claims: in cyberspace everyone's equal and nobody's ugly. Christian theology, as espoused by medieval art and literature, imagined a place for bodies (this world) and a place for minds and souls (the next world). But modern science and modern thought (the Renaissance invention of perspective; Copernicus, Newton, Einstein) have explained and demystified physical space, leaving "no place more special than any other," nowhere for us to imagine that souls can be. Wertheim discusses hopeful fictions of "hyperspace," from H.G. Wells to Cubism to Star Wars, before turning (in chapter 6) to the Net, whose denizens?especially users of MUDS (multiple-user dungeons)?have, she contends, found a space for the soul online. This is, she adds, cause for both celebration and worry, since the "cyber-utopians" haven't found a clear way to make cyberspace stand (as Heaven did) for an ethics. Wertheim is intent on explaining the Net's meanings, not its workings. If her book belongs to one particular field, it's the minuscule?but mushrooming?one in which literary and cultural critics consider Net phenomena. As such, it's both provocative and worthwhile.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Science journalist Wertheim (Pythagoras' Trousers, Norton, 1997) explores the concept of cyberspace as a repository for spiritual yearning, suggesting that it returns humankind to a medieval cosmological position. That position dictates that we possess a physical space of body, and a metaphysical space (i.e., cyberspace) that many individuals hope will serve as a new space for the soul. She traces the history of space beginning with the cosmology of Dante. Her journey continues through the historical foundations of celestial space, relativistic space, hyperspace, and, finally, cyberspace. While there are many who believe in the transcendent potential of cyberspace, Wertheim suggests that cyberspace lacks the necessary moral dimension for such potential to be realized, leading the reader to question whether cyberspace can have any actual redemptive significance. Instead, she says, cyberspace may serve simply as a metaphor for community, bound together by networks of relationships. For an informed audience, this is a provocative, if somewhat esoteric, study of space in its many conceptual forms.AJoe J. Accardi, Northeastern Illinois Univ. Lib., Chicago
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

To Wertheim, space means either physical or spiritual space, and her discussion is grounded in the arts, as represented by Dante, Giotto, and Raphael, and in the sciences, starring Newton, Einstein, et al. Wertheim preludes the link between cyberspace and those figures with what they "encoded" in their masterpieces. Interpreting The Divine Comedy's medieval view of space, followed by the refinement of perspective in Renaissance painting, leads the author to argue for them as the Virtual Realities of their time, which conveyed culturally meaningful encodings of earthly and heavenly space. Her argument then looks at physics' expulsion of God from space, the tenacious deity returning only with the evidence that the universe had a big bang beginning. Contemplating the prophets of cyber-spatial spirituality with both seriousness and skepticism, Wertheim has discovered their cultural lineage in the elucidation of the boundary between the corporeal and the ethereal. An intriguing study. Gilbert Taylor --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Is the Internet really a place where disembodied souls can find freedom? Science writer Wertheim (Pythagoras' Trousers: God, Physics, and the Gender Wars, 1995) builds a strong historical and philosophical case for the spirituality of cyberspace. According to Wertheim, the medieval worldview posited an essential dualism between the physical body, which existed on earth, and the soul, which could ascend to a higher heavenly plane. With the advent of modern science, however, all realms were incorporated within the rubric of physical space. The body still had a habitus, but the soul was displaced. Wertheim labors a bit too long on the history of this interpretive transformation, devoting whole chapters to the nature of heavenly space as depicted in Dante and Renaissance art (though the breadth of her knowledge of philosophy and art history, as well as science, shows her to be a rare ``Renaissance'' thinker). She then explores how the Enlightenment effectively abolished celestial space by declaring the supremacy of empirical reality, and how the 20th century has inaugurated something called ``hyperspace'': space is all that can be said to exist. Even matter is only reconfigured, curved space. The last third of the book throws cyberspace into this historical mix. Wertheim argues quite cogently that cyberspace has superseded concepts of hyperspace to become a kind of ``metaphysical gateway,'' a threshold into an entirely new dimension. Well, not new exactly. In one of the book's genius strokes, Wertheim hearkens back to the medieval concept of space to declare that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Like the medieval thinkers, cybernauts cling to the Internet as a sort of heavenly sphere where bodies, age, race, gender, and nationality cease to exist. Ironically, our most stunning scientific achievement has returned us to a spiritual dualism. And Wertheim claims that this is ultimately ``an essentially positive vision,'' since cyberspace is built upon a network of human relationships. Dense but marvelously provocative. (37 b&w illustrations, not seen) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

An eloquent, powerful, startling and original book--it gripped me from first to last. -- Oliver Sacks

In this wonderful new book, [Wertheim] discerns profound analogies between cyberspace, Dante's Paradiso, and Einsteinian physics. -- John Horgan, author of The End of Science

Is Wertheim a sort of low-key Net-prophet, or a debunker? Actually, she's both. The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace is a book for everyone. -- Salon

[F]ew writers summarise complex ideas better than Wertheim, and fewer still have the ambition and curiosity to see where, if anywhere, aesthetics and physics connect. -- New Scientist, Simon Ings

Traces the evolution of the concept of space from the Middle Ages through the rise of modern science and on to cyberspace. The author challenges the current spiritualizing of cyberspace and suggests that it cannot sustain religious dreams. Softcover. DLC: Computers and civilization.

Margaret Wertheim is a science journalist and commentator and author of the book Pythagoras' Trousers.