There is an intellectual thread that runs through all of these advances: measurement and calculation. Geometric calculations led to breakthroughs in painting, astronomy, cartography, surveying, and physics. The introduction of mathematics in human affairs led to advancements in accounting, finance, fiscal affairs, demography, and economics – a kind of social mathematics. All reflect an underlying ‘calculating paradigm’ – the idea that measurement, calculation, and mathematics can be successfully applied to virtually every domain. This paradigm spread across Europe through education, which we can observe by the proliferation of mathematics textbooks and schools. It was this paradigm, more than science itself, that drove progress. It was this mathematical revolution that created modernity.
What does seem clear is that, ever since the Big Bang, time has only moved in one direction. We experience time as flowing from the past to the present and into the future, never doubling back or changing course. This is completely unlike our experience of three-dimensional space, which we can move in freely.
Is our perception of time wrong?
Just as birth certificates note the time we enter the world, death certificates mark the moment we exit it. This practice reflects traditional notions about life and death as binaries. We are here until, suddenly, like a light switched off, we are gone.
But while this idea of death is pervasive, evidence is building that it is an outdated social construct, not really grounded in biology. Dying is in fact a process—one with no clear point demarcating the threshold across which someone cannot come back.
While the idea of magma rising was no doubt scary for tourists visiting the nearby Blue Lagoon geothermal spa, which was closed as a precaution, Iceland’s residents have learned over centuries to live with their island’s overactive geology.
So, why is Iceland so volcanically active?
The answer has two parts: One has to do with what geologists unimaginatively call a hotspot, and the other involves giant tectonic plates that are pulling apart right beneath the island. As a geologist, I study both.