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Having been banished from his home and friends, Dante created in The Divine Comedy a new life for himself. Denied a voice in Florence, he recreated h… - Margaret Wertheim
" "Having been banished from his home and friends, Dante created in The Divine Comedy a new life for himself. Denied a voice in Florence, he recreated himself in fiction and gave this poetic "self" a voice that would ring through the ages. What we have in the poem is, in effect, a "virtual Dante." In fact we know far more about this virtual Dante (what literary critics call "Dante-pilgrim") than we know about the real historical person ("Dante-poet"). It is this virtual self who speaks to us across the centuries and is our guide through the landscape of medieval soul-space.
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About Margaret Wertheim
Margaret Wertheim (born 20 August 1958) is an Australian-born science writer, curator, and artist based in the United States. She is the author of books on the cultural history of physics, and has written about science, including for the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Guardian, Aeon and Cabinet. Wertheim and her twin sister, Christine Wertheim, are co-founders of the Institute For Figuring (IFF)], a Los Angeles-based non-profit organization though which they create projects at the intersection of art, science and mathematics.
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Additional quotes by Margaret Wertheim
In many respects the mythico-religious dimension of Pythagoras' life bears an uncanny resemblance to the life of Christ depicted in the New Testament. Both men are said to have been the offspring of a god and a virgin woman. In both cases their fathers received messages that a special child was to have been born to their wives—Joseph was told by an angel in a dream; Pythagoras' father, Mnesarchus, received the glad tidings from the Delphic oracle. Both spent a period of isolation on holy mountain, and both were said to have ascended bodily into the heavens upon their deaths. Furthermore, both spread their teachings in the form of parables, called akousmata by the Pythagoreans, and a number of parables from the New Testament are known to be versions of earlier Pythagorean akousmata.
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... Faraday's momentous discoveries did not immediately launch an electric power industry. For one thing, nobody yet imagined it would be possible to transmit this power over long distances. That realization did not come until the end the century, when physicists had acquired a formal mathematical understanding of how magnetism and electricity work together.
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