The prime spot for a group photograph of the great and good is the one in the middle. When our whippet jumps on the bed while we're in it there's only one place she can possibly go, in the middle. When Galileo suggested that the Earth went around the Sun he laid down a challenge to God's status. He was no longer in the middle.
Whenever I visited a new part of the country one of the first things I'd do was to get hold of an Ordnance Survey map. Spread it out on a table and you can find where you are, what's around and where there might be a good walk or bike ride. One of my minor fantasies was to have a wall large enough to be able to stick up the full set.
My attachment to the 1:50000 maps in particular was such that I used to use them to navigate across London. Unlike the A to Z you could see where you were, where you were going and what happened all the way in between. No need to shuffle back and forth between the pages trying to work out which road on one page matched up with which road on the next.
With paper based maps it was only by accident that you found yourself in the middle. Always seeming to be on the fold in the middle is probably one of those tricks of selective memory. Nowadays, its no doubt far more common for people to look at maps on their mobile phones. This not only gives a much smaller window on the world but, because you they often automatically put you in the middle, there's no longer any need to read the map to work out where you are.
Galileo's new perspective removed us from the centre of the Universe and relegated us to a place that's of no particular significance other than that we find ourselves here. On a small planet orbiting a mainstream sort of star along the billions of others in a galaxy which, in turn, is only one of billions of other galaxies. Paradoxically, the modern view of the Universe places us firmly back at the centre. Only now we're not at the absolute centre of the Universe, which its agreed doesn't exist, but at the centre of the observable Universe. And, just as each of us sees a slightly different, and therefore personal, rainbow, so each of us is at the centre of our own observable Universe. For example, if my head is 20cm from yours then it takes light just over half a nanosecond to travel the extra distance and so my Universe is displaced by about half a nano light second from yours.
Even if we've got less idea of all the other places we might be, and of what might lie in between, the fact that Google puts each of us in the centre of the map is at least consistent with modern cosmology.
And - in GPS Land, and in particular the Smartphone regions thereof, ones horizons shrink from the Olympian heights afforded by the 1:50000 (or even the 1:25000) down to ground snuffling "In 500 meters take the second exit".
ReplyDeleteJourneys that were once consisted of a progress through a wider landscape, with the traveller as a free agent, have now become a period of unknowing, the blinded wanderer being and reliant upon their guide.
Howard
DeleteThe only time I've ever used sat-nav was when I borrowed a colleagues car in South Africa. I'd tried very hard to see if he had a proper map so that I could put the trip into a wider geographical perspective, but there simply wasn't one to be had. You will also no doubt have noticed that child passengers, who once had little choice but to tease each other and look out of the window, are now fully occupied with their own screen based entertainment and presumably have little sense of where they've been let alone of the possibilities just over the horizon.