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The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet Margaret Wertheim. 1999. New York: W. W. Norton Company. [ISBN 0-393-04694-x, 336 pages including index. $24.95 USD.]
Aimed at readers who spend their days (and nights) living in the high-tech world of the Internet, Margaret Wertheim's most recent book shows how our ideas about space have developed from the late medieval cosmos, where a physical world sat underneath a spiritual realm, through Newtonian science, which extended the physical to infinity, wiping out any external spot for the soul to land, past Einstein's relativistic space and contemporary hyperspace physics, into the intangible but real world of cyberspace.
A science writer by trade, Wertheim interprets much of the hype and fiction about the Web, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence as a reaction to the totally materialist picture of space taught in elementary and high schools. Interestingly, she points out the "tremendous spiritual yearnings we see around us today," arguing that "a new kind of nonphysical space was almost guaranteed to attract 'spiritual'...