Take a mountain: is it a thing or a place? It is an elemental thing-place. The mountain looms before us as a massive place for things and as itself a thing. It looms as a Thing of things, just as stones and lichen on stones are in turn things of this Thing. Furthermore, just as such determinate things as rocks…
With the present work, I begin the first of two articles that approach the questions of space and place from a scientific perspective, through the presentation of historically grounded texts by three physicists. The first is The Discovery of Dynamics: A Study from a Machian Point of View of the Discovery and the Structure of Dynamical Theories (2001), by the…