A Brief History of Time and Space

Abstract

In the beginning, there was no time or space; in their absence, there was void or chaos. The cosmologies constructed by the human mind — whether expressed as mythology, religion or contemporary physics — have posited a state of formlessness, or of nothing, prior to the existence of time and space. Albert Einstein, whose theory of relativity occasioned a re-conceptualisation of time and space in the early twentieth century, noted that ‘scientific thought is a development of prescientific thought. As the concept of space was already fundamental in the latter, we should begin with the concept of space in prescientific thought’.¹ This insight pertains as well to prescientific concepts of time and to mythological accounts of the origin of time and space.