ing player to that of a
deconstructing user. He has assumed the position of author, himself.
This leap to authorship is precisely the character and quality of the
dimensional leap associated with today's renaissance.

The evidence of today's renaissance is at least as profound as that of
the one that went before. The16th century saw the successful
circumnavigation of the globe via the seas. The 20th century saw the
successful circumnavigation of the globe from space. The first
pictures of earth from space changed our perspective on this sphere
forever. In the same century, our dominance over the planet was
confirmed not just through our ability to travel around it, but to
destroy it. The atomic bomb (itself the result of a rude dimensional
interchange between submolecular particles) gave us the ability to
author the globe's very destiny. Now, instead of merely being able to
comprehend 'God's creation', we could actively control it. This is a
new perspective.

We also have our equivalent of perspective painting, in the invention
of the holograph. The holograph allows us to represent not just three,
but four dimensions on a two-dimensional plate. When the viewer walks
past a holograph she can observe the three-dimensional object over a
course of time. A bird can flap its wings in a single picture. But,
more importantly for our renaissance's purposes, the holographic plate
itself embodies a new renaissance principle. When the plate is smashed
into hundreds of pieces, we do not find that one piece contains the
bird's wing, and another piece the bird's beak. Each piece of the
plate contains a faint image of the entire subject. When the pieces
are put together, the image achieves greater resolution. But each
piece contains a representation of the totality. This leap in
dimensional understanding is now informing disciplines as diverse as
brain anatomy and computer programming.

Our analogy to calculus is the development of systems theory, chaos
math and the much-celebrated fractal. Confronting non-linear equations
on their own terms for the first time, mathematicians armed with
computers are coming to new understandings of the way numbers can be
used to represent the complex relationships between dimensions.
Accepting that the surfaces in our world, from coastlines to clouds,
exhibit the properties of both two and three-dimensional objects (just
what is the surface area of a cloud?) they came up with ways of
working with a