The Project
Today, it seems natural to think of space as something that has three dimensions – height, width, and depth. Yet this idea, which we now take almost for granted, emerged through centuries of philosophical and scientific reflection, and among its key contributors was a late antique scholar who is little known today: John Philoponus.
Living between the fifth and sixth centuries CE, in the lands of present-day Egypt, Philoponus was the first to develop a fully articulated theory of three-dimensional space. His works were lost for centuries, until they were rediscovered in Renaissance Europe, where they helped spark one of the most fertile scientific debates in history. This exhibition tells the story of an idea’s journey: from a thinker of late antiquity to the emergence of our modern conception of space.