The Shadow Club

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Science shows that the common-sense picture of the world is populated with awkward entities that should be simply unacceptable because they are immaterial. Shadows are an example. Shadows are holes in light - and holes are the prototypical immaterial entities. Shadows are absences, negatives entities. They are mysterious objects. Yet shadows, despite their questionable status, have been crucial in the progress of many scientific disciplines. Altitude and the size of the earth were measured by comparing shadows and they have played a major role in astronomy, geography and in the scientific study of perspective. The study of eclipses; the study of the earth's shape; the invention of linear perspective in the Renaissance; the understanding of mathematical projections: the red thread linking the history of these discoveries is the fact that shadows contain an enormous amount of information which may be properly unpacked by the reader of this book.