Cosmology fascinates me and I enjoy reading about it and learning about new discoveries. True, it might not transport me as much as a great performance of a Chopin nocturne, but that still leaves a lot of room for fascination. I often go to the library, usually looking for something else, and wind up borrowing a book or books on cosmology while I'm there. That's how I found "The New Universe and the Human Future," by Nancy Ellen Abrams and Joel R. Primack, Yale University Press, 2011.
Impresseive credentials: she's an attorney, a cultural philosopher and lecturer at the University of California, etc. He is a Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of California, etc. The book is adapted from the Terry Lectures that they gave at Yale University in October 2009. Impressive crednetials, indeed.
Good credentials, however, do not always translate into a good book. The basic tenet of the book is that the universe is not only imbued with meaning, but, if we fully realize what that meaning is, we will stop depredating our planet and turn into seven billion Johnny Appleseeds. I'm not kidding.
Do the authors somehow believe that if our politicians read this book, John Boehner would have another good cry while all the members of the House and Senate--in unison at last--belt their hearts out, singing "We Are The World?" Do the authors know nothing about the psychology of power?
According to the authors, we are cosmically special and live in a cosmically special time. So, special people. don't be intimidated by the size of the universe; we have a central role in it. In Chapter One, they discuss two cartoons that joke about the feeling of insignificance in an unbelievalby vast universe. The authors write:
In both cartoons, the feeling of cosmic insignificance is uncomfortable to think about, so the characters run from it. This feeling derives from the Newtonian assumption that in the incomprehensibly vast cold universe we are, to quote the famous biologist Stephen Jay Gould, a "fortuitous cosmic afterthought." But we know now that this is not the case. The new picture is revealing a universe in which we intelligent beings have a central or special place in several different senses of the phrase.
Tell that to Betelgeuse.
The cosmos is indeed a mysterium tremendum et fascinans. The sheer scale from quarks--or possibly strings--to the size of the unverse--or possibly multimverse--is so beyond the human scale that we are transported into a realm of awe--and for some, into a realm of terror, when we compare our size to Its. Yes, this can give us a new perspective--ecstasy, rememeber, refers to the delight of traveling outside ourselves. But meaningful is not an adjective to be applied to the cosmos. Meanings are created by brains; as far we know, there is no meaning without neurons or their equivalents, (artificial intelligence is possible.)
I used to think there was meaning outside the human brain; my error, however, is more excusable since I'm neither a top-notch physicist or a renowned cultural philosopher. A brief account of my becoming disabused of this notion might shed some light here. I knew that nature and the cosmos are indiffent to us; however, I did, and still do, find great meaning in the arts, especially in music. I was convinced that something so powerful had to be connected with something beyond. And I found in cosmology support for this. After all, galaxies have pitches, albeit some sixty octaves below middle C. So there was, sort of, music in the cosmos. And string theory--the idea that everything is built up from extremely tiny vibrating strings 'proved" to me that music was eveything. Then I got to know the brain a little better. All the universe has is vibrations; it is the human brain that interprets vibrations as pitch. Pitch--therefore music, in the sense of organization of pitches over time--does not exist outside the human brain. The awe that we should have for our brains, which not only give us music but enable us, via an organ that weighs only a few pounds, to appreciate and partly comprehend the vastness, smallness and majesty of existence, should be, well, endless. Sure, our brains receive data from the external world, but meaning and music always comes from within.
The old question about whether a tree falling makes a sound if no one is there to hear it no longer makes sense. The falling tree will make vibrations in the air. but if there is no brain to hear it, there will be no sound. Even the Big Bang, therefore, had no audible bang at all, since quarks and such antedate all ears by billions and billions of years.
The book is full of truly awesome pictures of the universe, and the physicist half of the two authors recounts our current knowledge about the universe in an admirable fashion, so the book is valuable for that. But trying to derive human values from a valueless splendor is folly indeed.
The authors state that we are living in a critical, halfway point in the cosmos, in which we have a central role, and give several reasons for this. I'm always suspicious when people believe we are central to the cosmos. Ptolemy all over again; give him a rest. Many Christians today believe that we are living, or at least approaching, the "end times"--and they've been believing this for the past two thousand years.
I will give only one of their silly reasons of why we are living "at a cosmically pivotal moment." Multicellular organisms, animals, came into existence 500 million years ago during the so-called Cambrian explosion. We are living at midpoint now, since the sun will support life on the planet for 500 million more years. (A highly doubtful presumption; most scientists believe the sun would be able to support life for a longer period than that.) That equals at least several hundred million (human) generations, they tell us. They write, "As the sun heats up, our descendants will have millons of generations to prepare to survive." Wow, we humans are unable to predict with accuracy whether the stock market will be up or down in a year; the authors, however, have no problem predicting that our descendants will be preparing for survival for the next half billion years! Such nonsense is rendered even more absurd by assuming that during that long period we will not have become extinct or not have evolved into something else. Name a species that has lasted 500 million years! A trilobite is not a human; how can the authors imagine that we will be essentially unchanged after 500 million years?
Yes, you guessed it, they also talk about the universe becoming conscious of itself as intelligent beings evolve. They even state that if we must stop our mad war against the planet, since this might be the last chance the universe has of becoming conscious of itself, since we might be the only highly intelligent life forms in the cosmos. Oh, the poor universe! Here is the Sun, just recovering from the extinction of the dinosaurs on Eatth, having to ponder the annihilation of those greedy yet glorious creatures who are giving her, after four billion years, a bit of self-consciousness of her own. Poor thing.
They speculate that, because of the lack an appropriate mythology, "Maybe this is why no aliens are here. They may have the technology but not the mythology." The mythology they present is simply the current picture of the cosmos according to physics. Awesome indeed, but a human mythology must address the human heart, and cosmology is unable to do this. The authors believe that it does, but they are wrong.
The authors claim we are so important and critical because we are so rare. Most of the cosmos is composed of dark energy and dark matter; only a tiny fraction of the universe is composed of atoms. But the universe is certainly vaster than we had hitherto imagined. The visible universe, a vast circle with a radius of 13.7 billion light-years with Earth at its center--nothing special here, it's the same radius with the Andromeda galaxy at the center, althugh the area swept by the circle would differ, more markedly when the center of the circle is very far from us--is only a part of the universe, and some say, a very small part of the universe. (We don't see it since light has 'only' traveled for 13.7 billion years since the origin of the cosmos.) Not only that, the theories of the multiverse and of Eternal Inflation, etc. while unproven, indicate that there's more to the cosmos than our own unvierse. So what's rare becomes, cosmically speaking, commonplace. If the cosmos is infinite and eternal as the Eternal Inflation theory would have it, matter, though a "lesser" infinity than dark enegry--at least in universes like ours--would be infinite nevertheless.
They talk about the importance of art, but I hope their aesthetic sense is not summed up by naming the new galaxy after ours and Andromeda collide, "Milky Andromeda." Ugh. "Milkandromeda" would be better, but, with a little effort, those with a better sense of language could come up with something that would stick.
The way to solve our problems, as the ancients have taught,is by putting love into action. Love Your Neighbor as Yourself. Empathy, compassion. A realizaion that greed, hate and delusion now have the ability to destroy us forever. In short, acting on the the best of what is within us. The power structure would have to evolve from Me Me to Us Us. If we make significant progress in the realization of love and wisdom, we might not have 500 million years of peace, but peace for a long long time to come If that happens, our descendents will indeed be blessed. Betelgeuse, however, will still not be impressed.
The book is a mess.
Impresseive credentials: she's an attorney, a cultural philosopher and lecturer at the University of California, etc. He is a Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of California, etc. The book is adapted from the Terry Lectures that they gave at Yale University in October 2009. Impressive crednetials, indeed.
Good credentials, however, do not always translate into a good book. The basic tenet of the book is that the universe is not only imbued with meaning, but, if we fully realize what that meaning is, we will stop depredating our planet and turn into seven billion Johnny Appleseeds. I'm not kidding.
Do the authors somehow believe that if our politicians read this book, John Boehner would have another good cry while all the members of the House and Senate--in unison at last--belt their hearts out, singing "We Are The World?" Do the authors know nothing about the psychology of power?
According to the authors, we are cosmically special and live in a cosmically special time. So, special people. don't be intimidated by the size of the universe; we have a central role in it. In Chapter One, they discuss two cartoons that joke about the feeling of insignificance in an unbelievalby vast universe. The authors write:
In both cartoons, the feeling of cosmic insignificance is uncomfortable to think about, so the characters run from it. This feeling derives from the Newtonian assumption that in the incomprehensibly vast cold universe we are, to quote the famous biologist Stephen Jay Gould, a "fortuitous cosmic afterthought." But we know now that this is not the case. The new picture is revealing a universe in which we intelligent beings have a central or special place in several different senses of the phrase.
Tell that to Betelgeuse.
The cosmos is indeed a mysterium tremendum et fascinans. The sheer scale from quarks--or possibly strings--to the size of the unverse--or possibly multimverse--is so beyond the human scale that we are transported into a realm of awe--and for some, into a realm of terror, when we compare our size to Its. Yes, this can give us a new perspective--ecstasy, rememeber, refers to the delight of traveling outside ourselves. But meaningful is not an adjective to be applied to the cosmos. Meanings are created by brains; as far we know, there is no meaning without neurons or their equivalents, (artificial intelligence is possible.)
I used to think there was meaning outside the human brain; my error, however, is more excusable since I'm neither a top-notch physicist or a renowned cultural philosopher. A brief account of my becoming disabused of this notion might shed some light here. I knew that nature and the cosmos are indiffent to us; however, I did, and still do, find great meaning in the arts, especially in music. I was convinced that something so powerful had to be connected with something beyond. And I found in cosmology support for this. After all, galaxies have pitches, albeit some sixty octaves below middle C. So there was, sort of, music in the cosmos. And string theory--the idea that everything is built up from extremely tiny vibrating strings 'proved" to me that music was eveything. Then I got to know the brain a little better. All the universe has is vibrations; it is the human brain that interprets vibrations as pitch. Pitch--therefore music, in the sense of organization of pitches over time--does not exist outside the human brain. The awe that we should have for our brains, which not only give us music but enable us, via an organ that weighs only a few pounds, to appreciate and partly comprehend the vastness, smallness and majesty of existence, should be, well, endless. Sure, our brains receive data from the external world, but meaning and music always comes from within.
The old question about whether a tree falling makes a sound if no one is there to hear it no longer makes sense. The falling tree will make vibrations in the air. but if there is no brain to hear it, there will be no sound. Even the Big Bang, therefore, had no audible bang at all, since quarks and such antedate all ears by billions and billions of years.
The book is full of truly awesome pictures of the universe, and the physicist half of the two authors recounts our current knowledge about the universe in an admirable fashion, so the book is valuable for that. But trying to derive human values from a valueless splendor is folly indeed.
The authors state that we are living in a critical, halfway point in the cosmos, in which we have a central role, and give several reasons for this. I'm always suspicious when people believe we are central to the cosmos. Ptolemy all over again; give him a rest. Many Christians today believe that we are living, or at least approaching, the "end times"--and they've been believing this for the past two thousand years.
I will give only one of their silly reasons of why we are living "at a cosmically pivotal moment." Multicellular organisms, animals, came into existence 500 million years ago during the so-called Cambrian explosion. We are living at midpoint now, since the sun will support life on the planet for 500 million more years. (A highly doubtful presumption; most scientists believe the sun would be able to support life for a longer period than that.) That equals at least several hundred million (human) generations, they tell us. They write, "As the sun heats up, our descendants will have millons of generations to prepare to survive." Wow, we humans are unable to predict with accuracy whether the stock market will be up or down in a year; the authors, however, have no problem predicting that our descendants will be preparing for survival for the next half billion years! Such nonsense is rendered even more absurd by assuming that during that long period we will not have become extinct or not have evolved into something else. Name a species that has lasted 500 million years! A trilobite is not a human; how can the authors imagine that we will be essentially unchanged after 500 million years?
Yes, you guessed it, they also talk about the universe becoming conscious of itself as intelligent beings evolve. They even state that if we must stop our mad war against the planet, since this might be the last chance the universe has of becoming conscious of itself, since we might be the only highly intelligent life forms in the cosmos. Oh, the poor universe! Here is the Sun, just recovering from the extinction of the dinosaurs on Eatth, having to ponder the annihilation of those greedy yet glorious creatures who are giving her, after four billion years, a bit of self-consciousness of her own. Poor thing.
They speculate that, because of the lack an appropriate mythology, "Maybe this is why no aliens are here. They may have the technology but not the mythology." The mythology they present is simply the current picture of the cosmos according to physics. Awesome indeed, but a human mythology must address the human heart, and cosmology is unable to do this. The authors believe that it does, but they are wrong.
The authors claim we are so important and critical because we are so rare. Most of the cosmos is composed of dark energy and dark matter; only a tiny fraction of the universe is composed of atoms. But the universe is certainly vaster than we had hitherto imagined. The visible universe, a vast circle with a radius of 13.7 billion light-years with Earth at its center--nothing special here, it's the same radius with the Andromeda galaxy at the center, althugh the area swept by the circle would differ, more markedly when the center of the circle is very far from us--is only a part of the universe, and some say, a very small part of the universe. (We don't see it since light has 'only' traveled for 13.7 billion years since the origin of the cosmos.) Not only that, the theories of the multiverse and of Eternal Inflation, etc. while unproven, indicate that there's more to the cosmos than our own unvierse. So what's rare becomes, cosmically speaking, commonplace. If the cosmos is infinite and eternal as the Eternal Inflation theory would have it, matter, though a "lesser" infinity than dark enegry--at least in universes like ours--would be infinite nevertheless.
They talk about the importance of art, but I hope their aesthetic sense is not summed up by naming the new galaxy after ours and Andromeda collide, "Milky Andromeda." Ugh. "Milkandromeda" would be better, but, with a little effort, those with a better sense of language could come up with something that would stick.
The way to solve our problems, as the ancients have taught,is by putting love into action. Love Your Neighbor as Yourself. Empathy, compassion. A realizaion that greed, hate and delusion now have the ability to destroy us forever. In short, acting on the the best of what is within us. The power structure would have to evolve from Me Me to Us Us. If we make significant progress in the realization of love and wisdom, we might not have 500 million years of peace, but peace for a long long time to come If that happens, our descendents will indeed be blessed. Betelgeuse, however, will still not be impressed.
The book is a mess.
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