ABSTRACT
Accordingly, we might distinguish eleven major eras in this history. I do not intend these eras to be thought of as in an absolute sequence, in which when one begins, the previous one must be over and done with; and the roots of a later era may well go back to the earliest beginnings. In the “later” stages, time itself will have taken on a geometry in which “earlier” and “later” will themselves be categories too crude to describe what is going on, and such terms as “bottom-up” and “top-down,” or “micro” and “macro,” or “fundamental” and “advanced” might be substituted, though with their own distorting implications.
