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9780061137877: You Are Here: A Portable History of the Universe
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You Are Here is a dazzling exploration of the universe and our relationship to it, as seen through the lens of today's most cutting-edge scientific thinking. Here, for the first time in a single span, is the life of the universe, from quarks to galaxy superclusters and from slime to Homo sapiens. Christopher Potter brilliantly tells the story of how something evolved from nothing and how something became everything; how the universe was once a moment of perfect symmetry and is now 13.7 billion years of history. With wisdom and wonder, Potter traverses the cosmos from its conception to its eventual end—while exploring everything in between.

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About the Author:

Christopher Potter is the former publisher and managing director of 4th Estate. He lives in London and New York City.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
Orientation

The eternal silence of these infinite spaces alarms me.
Blaise Pascal
You are here, it says on the map in the park, the train station and the shopping centre, an arrow, usually red, pointing to some reassuringly definite location. But where is here, exactly? Children know, or think they know. On the flyleaf of a first book, I wrote out, as we all did after our own fashion, my full cosmic address — Christopher Potter, 225 Rushgreen Road, Lymn, Cheshire, England, The United Kingdom, The World, The Solar System, The Galaxy — my childish handwriting getting larger and larger, as if each part of the address I knew to be bigger and more important than the preceding part, until, with a final flourish, that acme of destinations is reached: the universe itself, the place that must locate everything there is.

As children we soon become aware that the universe must be a strange place. I used to keep myself awake at night trying to imagine what lay beyond the edge of the universe. If the universe contains everything there is, then what is it contained in? We now know, scientists tell us, that the visible universe is a region of radiation that evolved and is not contained in anything. But such a description raises too many questions that are more disturbing than the question we had hoped to have had answered in the first place, and so we quickly put the universe back in its box and think about something else instead.

We do not like to think about the universe because we fear the immensity that is everything. The universe reduces us to a nub, making it difficult to escape the idea that size matters. After all, who can deny the universe when there is so much of it? ‘Spiritual aspirations threaten to be swallowed up by this senseless bulk into a sort of nightmare of meaninglessness,’ wrote the Anglo-German scholar Edward Conze (1904—1979). ‘The enormous quantity of matter that we perceive around us, compared with the trembling little flicker of spiritual insight that we perceive within us, seems to tell strongly in favour of a materialistic outlook on life.’ We know that we must lose if we are to contest the universe.

Just as terrifying is the idea of nothing at all. A little while ago each of us was nothing, and then was something. No wonder children have nightmares. The something of our existence ought to make the nothingness that preceded life an impossibility, since we also know, as King Lear observes, that ‘nothing can come of nothing’. And yet every day in the annihilation and miraculous resurrection of the ego that is going to sleep and waking up, we are reminded of that very nothingness from which each of us emerges.

If there is something — which there appears to be — then where did that something come from? Such thoughts coincide with the first inklings we have of our own mortality. Death and nothingness go hand in hand: twin terrors to put alongside our terror of the infinite; terrors we spend the rest of our lives suppressing into the shape of our adult selves.

Humans are caught in a bind. On the one hand we know that there is something because we are each sure of our own existence; but we also know there is nothing because we fear that that is where we came from and where we are headed. We know intellectually that the nothingness of death is inescapable but do not actually believe it. ‘We are all immortal,’ the American novelist John Updike reminds us, ‘for as long as we live.’

‘What happens when I die?’ a child soon asks, a question that as adults we also put to one side. Not even a material girl in a material world would be satisfied with an answer that was restricted to descriptions of physical decay, and yet even a material answer to such a question, and indeed to all questions, will end up at the same place. What is the material of the world and where does it come from? To think about the universe is to ask again the childhood questions we no longer ask: What is everything? And what is nothing?

Seemingly all children start out as budding scientists unafraid to follow a trail of questioning to exhaustion, even if the exhaustion is usually that of their parents. Curiosity drives children to ask why? And why? And why? hoping to arrive at some final destination, like the universe at the end of our cosmic address, a final answer beyond which there are no more whys.

‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ asked the German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz (1646—1716), the question that any description of the universe must ultimately be able to address. Science attempts to answer ‘why’ questions with ‘how’ answers, invoking the dynamic of stuff in the world. But ‘how’ answers also converge on that same ultimate question: instead of asking ‘why is there something rather than nothing?’, scientists ask ‘how did something come out of nothing?’ In order to account for the everything-ness of the universe we must also account for the nothing-ness from which it seems to have appeared. But what could such material as the world is made of look like when it is nothing, and what possible actions could have transformed nothing into something, and something into the everything we call the universe?

For hundreds of years, and for as long as the word has meant anything, science has shown itself to be an evolving process of investigation into whatever it is that is Out There, a place of things that are in motion, and what we mean by the universe. So who better, we might think, than scientists to answer the question: Where — between the void and everything — are we?

Their replies are not always encouraging:

· ‘Man knows at last, that he is alone in the unfeeling immensity of the universe, out of which he has emerged only by chance,’ the French biologist Jacques Monod (1910—1976) once wrote, with what sounds like glee that we should have finally found this out.

· ‘Science has revealed much about the world and our position in it. And generally, the findings have been humbling.’ writes Nick Bostrom, Director of the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford. ‘The earth is not the centre of the universe. Our species descended from brutes. We are made of the same stuff as mud. We are moved by neurophysiological signals and subject to a variety of biological, psychological and sociological influences over which we have limited control and little understanding.’

· ‘Our true position,’ says the American physicist Armand Delsemme, ‘[is one] of isolation, in an immense and mysterious universe.’

Isolated in pointlessness: no wonder we non-scientists would rather stay indoors and watch television, or read Middlemarch, or do whatever it is that we do indoors. If this is the universe as science describes it, then we surely want none of it. Such a description only reignites those nauseous existential fears we have suppressed since childhood.

Or are these my fears and not yours? I have friends who claim that they never think about the universe at all. And yet I can’t help but feel that such rejection — of the universe of all things! — is evidence of deep repression rather than lack of interest. Who, after all, wants to be told that they are insignificant specks in a vast, purposeless and uncaring universe? And if we do take note, it’s hard not to blame science for finding it out. These stark scientific pronouncements seem impossible to deny. Easier, then, not to think about science either, for fear of being told something irrefutable that we would much rather not know: that we do not have free will; that the mind is merely a quality of the brain; that gods do not exist; that the only reality is material reality; that any knowledge that isn’t scientific knowledge is not just worthless, it isn’t knowledge at all.

Sometimes it seems that what science is telling us is that the universe has little in common with the subjective experiences that define us as human beings. We seem to be in opposition to a universe at best uninterested in the qualities that make us human, which makes some of us think — a thought we’d presumably rather not have — that to be human is to be intrinsically separate from the source of our own creation.

To be at peace with the universe is not easy. The English mathematician Frank Ramsey (1903—1930) found a way of accommodating the universe by accommodating the idea of size itself: ‘Where I seem to differ from some of my friends is in attaching little importance to physical size. I don’t feel the least humble before the vastness of the heavens. The stars may be large, but they cannot think or love; and these are qualities which impress me far more than size does . . . My picture of the world is drawn in perspective . . . The foreground is occupied by human beings, and the stars are all as small as threepenny bits.’ The contemporary astronomer Alan Dressler has a similar strategy: ‘If we could learn to look at the universe with eyes that are blind to power and size, but keen for subtlety and complexity, then our world would outshine a galaxy of stars.’

Drawing the universe in human scale might remind us of the world as seen in paintings before the discovery of formal perspective, where a different hierarchy of size is imposed. In pre-Renaissance paintings, the hierarchy is based on relative spiritual importance, so that the Virgin Mary, say, looms large over the saints, who in turn dominate the kneeling donor who has commissioned the painting in the first place. For Ramsey it is humanity that is the measure of the world, not a spiritual nor a literal yardstick. But this doesn’t help us much if, putting aside all fears and existential vertigo, we cannot escape the idea that science might be all that there is, that the whole universe can be measured and brought to account. We might all too easily convince ourselves that science reduces our lives to files and card indexes, as in some totalitarian regime that believes its citizens are best subdued when they are reduced to statistics. Rigid, authoritarian, patriarchal, analytical, without emotional content: these are some of the qualities we could be tempted to ascribe to science and scientists.

But there is another side. Half a century ago, the English astronomer and physicist Fred Hoyle (1915—2001) noted, admittedly with a hint of exasperation, the curious fact that ‘while most scientists claim to eschew religion, it actually dominates their thoughts more than it does the clergy’. Certainly most of the prominent scientists of the past were believers. A recent poll shows that perhaps 50 per cent of scientists today believe in some form of a personal God, while another poll tells us that only 30 of the hundred physicists who were asked believe that parallel universes actually exist. ‘I would like to know how God created the world,’ Einstein (1) once said. ‘I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I would like to know His thoughts. The rest is detail.’

Even hard-line materialists like the English theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking (b.1942) and the American physicist Steven Weinberg (b.1933) sprinkle their writings with talk of the possible nature of the God in which they do not believe. Hawking tells us that we may actually be close to knowing the mind of God, while Weinberg, even-handedly, tells us that ‘science does not make it impossible to believe in God. It just makes it possible to not believe in God.’

Science is atheistic only in so far as it means to explain nature without recourse to the supernatural. In science, nature can be mysterious but it is not permitted to be mystical. Scientists, however, need not be atheistic, nor must agnosticism necessarily rule out spirituality. If science ever explains everything, only then do the gods die. But can science ever explain everything? Hawking has proclaimed that ‘we may now be near the end of the search for the ultimate laws of nature’, but it is far from clear that this is the case. At the end of the nineteenth century a similar declaration was made by the American physicist Albert Michelson (1852—1931): ‘It seems probable that most of the grand underlying principles have been firmly established and that further advances are to be sought chiefly in the rigorous application of these principles to all phenomena which comes under our notice.’ He could not have been more wrong. One of the most fertile periods in the history of science was just about to begin. The universe’s finest joke may be to reveal itself, as science systematically uncovers some of its secrets, as ever more mysterious.

In any case, since science has persuaded us to be agnostic about almost everything, perhaps now, in the ultimate act of modern ennui and irony, we might be inclined to be agnostic about science too. ‘Your cry of triumph at some new discovery will be echoed by a universal cry of horror,’ the German playwright Bertolt Brecht (1898—1956) has Galileo say in his play The Life of Galileo. What is the cost of knowledge, we ask more and more insistently as science both creates and brings to the edge of destruction the world we live in? Sometimes the very certainty of the uncertainty that science has uncovered looks like dogmatism. Why do I feel sure that the uncertainty some scientists urge us to embrace is not what the poet Keats had in mind when he wrote of the ‘Man of Achievement . . . capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable striving after fact & reason’, a quality he named Negative Capability? For the same reason, I suspect, that I am disturbed by the wild-eyed optimism of those scientists who urge us to look to further scientific progress to put a damaged world back together again. (2) How much unrestrained scientific optimism in unrestrained scientific progress can we bear?

The scientific method, like capitalism, is always in search of new territory to exploit. Capitalism, Marx predicted, would come to an end when there were no more markets left. In our own age, the emergence of some of the largest markets in the history of civilisation makes such an end seem a long way off. And science outstrips even capitalism. We have begun to realise that there may not be so much time left for the earth, at least not as a place willing to host us. Not to worry, say the champions of scientific materialism, trust us, we are certain (well, pretty certain) that when we have conquered space we will find that there are many other places, somewhere out there, that we might claim as home. And if there aren’t, we’ll just build you a new one from scratch.

But for all the confident talk of leaving home and finding other places to live, such far-flung travel is highly speculative, hardly proper science even, given the limits set by our current understanding of the laws of nature. Perhaps the more we know about how the universe is constructed, the more reasons we will discover why we are bound to this place as our home. Putting aside all the hopes of science fiction, and science theory so speculative it might as well be fiction, it seems more realistic to suppose that we are unlikely ever to travel beyond the solar system, perhaps not even so far. Mankind hasn’t walked on the moon for over a generation, and we are just beginning to realise that eve...

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  • PublisherHarper Perennial
  • Publication date2010
  • ISBN 10 0061137871
  • ISBN 13 9780061137877
  • BindingPaperback
  • Number of pages294
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