The Mystery of the Universe

In this post, I would like to review three related books Out of Wonder: The Evolving Story of the Universe by Nellie McLaughlan (Veritas, Dublin, 2016), Cosmos: The Story of Cosmic Evolution, Science and Civilisation by Carl Sagan (Abacus, 2009, originally MacDonald, 1981) and Calculating the Cosmos: How Mathematics Unveils the Universe, Ian Steward, Profile Books, 2016.

These three books ascend in difficulty like three steps on a ladder; the first written from a spiritual/philosophical/wonderment/mystical view of the universe; the second, by far the oldest of the three works tells the fascinating story of cosmic evolution from the point of view of a professor of Astronomy and Space Sciences; while the last is by a mathematician of international renown.

The Mind-blowing Magnitude of Space

The French philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623 – 1662) averred famously in his book Pensées (published posthumously in 1670) that contemplating humanity's place in the universe, dwarfed as we are by the vastness of space, is frightening, as is seen in his statement, "the eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me".   Another similar quotation, which I like, obviously inspired by wonder rather than fear, is from Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 -1834), the philosophical poet of the English Romantic Movement, which runs: “From walking forth at night and gazing at the starry heavens in the company of my father, my mind became habituated to the Vast.” 

Given Pascal’s fear and Coleridge’s awe of the vastness of space, let’s take a quick look at the size of these numbers that refer to this mind-blowing vastness: Travel more than 100 km above the surface of the Earth, and you’re in space, at the edge of the atmosphere.  The Moon is 400,000 km away. That’s the same distance as 10 times round the Earth.  It’s 78 million kilometres (78,000,000 km) from Earth to Mars, and it’s 4350 million kilometres (4,350,000,000 km) to Neptune.  Obviously, the further out we go, the more difficult it becomes to write these long numbers.  Hence, astronomers invented a shorter and less cumbersome numbering system.  One such unit for measuring very big distances is the light year. This is the distance that light travels in a year, so 1 light year is about 9,500,000,000,000 km. Using this unit, we say that the star Proxima Centauri is about 4.2 light-years away. The centre of our Milky Way galaxy is 27,700 light-years from our little planet.  Imagine now attempting to write that in kilometres with a sequence of zeros while Andromeda, the nearest large galaxy to us, is 2,900,000 light-years away.  Apparently, the furthest galaxies seen in the universe are 15,000,000,000 light-years from us.  Lastly, as this will be my final confounding large number, the astronomers and scientists tell us that the observable universe is approximately 93 billion light-years in diameter.  Furthermore, the total size of the universe beyond what we can see is unknown and may be infinite. This is an amazing paradox, really, because while the universe has existed for only about 13.8 billion years, you would think that that number would be within that time limit.  The reason that it is far greater is that the universe has been expanding during that time, pushing the most distant light we can detect further away than its travel time would suggest.

Out of Wonder: The Evolving Story of the Universe

The first book in this trilogy I present here for review, is by far the easiest read and really is one grounded in spirituality.  It is written by a Catholic religious sister, a retired school teacher.  While it is crammed with scientific detail, it is only used to show the wonder and awe of the writer before the sheer mystery of the vastness of the universe and our own corresponding absolute minuteness within that expanse.  Plato’s dictum that philosophy begins in wonder could be profitably expanded to take in science and mythology as well as spirituality.  Indeed, wonder at our very being is surely the motivation for our knowledge in every sphere of human endeavour. 

It will only take three or four hours to read this book, and it could be a profitable and relaxing bedtime reading for many.  It avoids any traditional piousness and fits in well with any New Age testament to celebrate “the oneness of all”, what Coleridge called “the unity behind the multeity.”  It is a refreshingly eclectic book for a Catholic nun who is at home with evolution, scientific discovery, the Big Bang, vast numbers stated in scientific notation, as well as the spirituality of the great goddess, of Gaia, Mother Earth, as well as the green ecological outlook of Pope Francis.  This is a book that consequently asks us to question our presuppositions, to be broad-minded and open to all possibilities, to be open to accepting reconnection to our planet in wonder and praise, and in action for its protection from humankind’s hubris and greed.

Our human story is integral to the universe's story.  Our ancestral heritage is literally within the flaring forth of the universe, almost 14 billion years ago.  We emanate from stars…. I am made of stardust, a child of the universe.  Let us reconnect with our true lineage and celebrate that it took billions of years…. before the human emerged some time between 2.6 and 2.7 million years ago…. On a timescale of 14 billion years, planet Earth was formed around 4.5 billion years ago, while we humans emerged over 2.6 million years ago.  Taking the image of a day, we arrived very close to midnight.  The human is that being in whom the universe becomes conscious of and celebrates itself in conscious self-awareness (p. 35 – 37)

Cosmos: The Story of Cosmic Evolution, Science and Civilisation

It is hard to believe that it will be 30 years in December 2026 since the great scientist and astronomer Carl Sagan died at the relatively young age of 62.  He spent most of his career as a professor of astronomy at Cornell University, where he directed the Laboratory for Planetary Studies.  Throughout his life, Sagan received numerous awards and honours for his many works of scholarship, and indeed for his ability to communicate scientific facts to the general public.  He was quintessentially a brilliant communicator, and his death was widely mourned. In this regard, he was the recipient of the Joseph Priestly Award “for distinguished contributions to the welfare of mankind”, and the Pulitzer Prize for Literature. The all-encompassing title of this book gives a short indication of the brilliant and voluminously detailed account given in the book of the evolution of the universe, the growth of science and the development of our civilisation.  This book is overflowing with historical accounts of the development of knowledge, science and culture over the broadest sweep possible from the Big Bang to the early 1980s.  It is an intellectual and supreme achievement for a great human mind.  It is also written in the clearest style of a professional writer.  No wonder he won a Pulitzer Prize. The book was written to accompany the award-winning 1980 television series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, which became the most widely watched series in the history of American public television.

Among the widely diverse topics covered in this gem of scholarship are the famous library of ancient Alexandria, the various spacecraft missions to nearby planets, the human brain, Egyptian pyramids and hieroglyphics, the origin of life, biochemistry of life, nuclear fusion and fission, nuclear war, the evolution of galaxies, black holes and supernovae.  These topics are taken randomly from an index of some twenty pages.  I love the comprehensiveness of Sagan’s vision: “Because science is inseparable from the rest of human endeavour, it cannot be discussed without making contact, sometimes glancing, sometimes head-on, with a number of social, political, religious and philosophical issues” (p. 15).  He then repeats the often-quoted line in his field of study and work, which is worth reiterating here: “The essence of science is that it is self-correcting.” (p. 16) The epigraphs, that is, the quotations he puts at the beginning of each chapter, are themselves profound and from a diversity of sources that show Sagan’s breadth of knowledge, not only in science in general but also in literature.  His quotation from Thomas Huxley is apt as it captures the whole purpose of his book: “The known is finite, the unknown infinite; intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability.  Our business in every generation is to reclaim a little more land.” (1887, quoted p 19) Sagan wishes the reader to learn what it means to take a “cosmic perspective” on life.  Like the other two books, this one abounds in huge numbers, thankfully all in scientific notation, where the long lists of zeros have been somewhat cut down to a more manageable description.  The history of astronomy, science and civilisation covered runs to some 382 pages, with both a comprehensive bibliography and index added to that number.  Many notable scholars have suffered much during that history as we progressed from a geocentric model that places a stationary Earth at the centre of the universe (for these early scholars our solar system was the known universe) with the Sun, Moon, and stars revolving around it, eventually giving way to the heliocentric model, which correctly places the Sun at the centre of our solar system. The sixteenth-century Roman Catholic scholar Giordano Bruno, who held that there are an infinity of worlds and that many could be inhabited, was burned at the stake for this apostasy in 1600. We have progressed so much in our knowledge of the expanse of the universe since those horrific times, and this book recounts magnificently that amazing development.  Here follows my last quotation from this mind-blowing book: “The size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding…. In a cosmic perspective, most human concerns seem insignificant, even petty…. I believe our future depends on how well we know this Cosmos in which we float like a mote of dust in the morning sky…. Basically, we are just like butterflies who float for a day and think it is forever.” (p. 20, 44)

Calculating the Cosmos: How Mathematics Unveils the Universe

While this is not an academic book per se, neither is it an easy introduction for the general reader to the important contributions of Kepler and Newton, the theory of gravity, Einstein’s theory of general relativity, the Big Bang, dark matter and dark energy and so on.  In essence, this book falls someway between these two poles.  I had to read some paragraphs several times to get the drift of what Professor Steward was explaining, but I found the effort worthwhile and affirming of my neophyte understanding.  Ian Stewart is a Mathematics Professor Emeritus at Warwick University and is a Fellow of the Royal Society.  An interesting fact that this amateur mathematician learned is that, from an astronomical point of view, a circle is a special type of ellipse, the latter being a more primordial ancestor of the circle.  The astronomer Edmond Halley once asked Newton how he knew that the inverse square law of attraction implies that the orbit of a planet is an ellipse.  The astute scientist replied, “Why, sir, I have calculated it.”  Steward begins this book with this epigraph and proceeds to illustrate how mathematics is the key to calculating not just ellipses but every aspect of the universe.  “Mathematics has proved essential to understanding the Sun, Moon, planets, stars, and the vast panoply of associated objects that together form the cosmos – the universe considered on a grand scale.” (p. 5) The central principle of gravity and its numerical value for us earth-bound creatures, calculated by Newton, is a very important mathematical truth on which many other aspects of the solar system can be calculated.  However, the learned Professor is quick to remind us that “chaos theory, coupled with today’s powerful computers”, has meant that the clockwork model of the universe deriving from Newton “remains valid over short periods of time” in a universe where “a million years is usually short.” (p. 7) Furthermore, our solar system (which our ancient forefathers thought was the entire universe) is merely “one insignificant bunch of rocks among quadrillions.” (p. 8) Now, a quadrillion is 1 followed by fifteen zeros, or 1 multiplied by 10 to the power of fifteen, or to put it another way, one thousand trillion. I find it hard to get my mind around the fact that there are one thousand trillion solar systems in our ever-expanding universe.

Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity is one where the force of gravity is replaced by the curvature of spacetime.  Newtonian physics in the light of the vastness of the universe is replaced by Einsteinian relativity.  This is all mind-boggling stuff to my unscientific mind.  Further mind-blowing for my poor brain is the fact that it was “spacetime that exploded, not something else exploding within spacetime.” (p. 9) Stewart points out that new answers always open up new mysteries like dark matter, dark energy, and inflation (that is, the effect that caused the early universe to grow by an enormous amount in a minuscule instant of time).  A constant in all fields of knowledge, it would seem to me, is the noticing of patterns.  Doctors, scientists and psychiatrists, as I have discovered through my own experience, rely not alone on technology but also heavily on observation of patients.  They can observe patterns and breaks or disturbances in patterns that should be there.  Steward states this process succinctly and beautifully early in his prologue to this substantial and challenging book: “Arguably, the greatest breakthrough is to realise that there are patterns.  After that, you know what to look for, and while it may be difficult to pin answers down, the problems become a matter of technique.  Entirely new mathematical ideas often have to be invented.  I’m not claiming it’s easy or straightforward.  It’s a long-running game and it’s still playing out.” (p. 10)

The diagrams and photographic plates that accompany this book are excellent and illustrate many of the ideas aptly.  In this respect, the reader will delight in brilliant pictures of Pluto, Pluto’s satellite Charon, Jupiter’s moons Io and Europa, Saturn, Halley’s comet, the Milky Way and a picture of a Spiral Galaxy.  There is an interesting diagram (line drawing) of a rotating (Kerr) black hole on page 219, which again is a confounding mystery to this amateur scientist.  Thankfully, the book has a handy glossary of “units and jargon,” a comprehensive section on notes and references, supplemented by a fine index.

I certainly haven’t understood all that these books contain or refer to, but I have enjoyed the challenge and the encounter with them by way of convincing me further about the complexity and sheer mystery of the universe.  Furthermore, I am astounded at the ingenuity and intelligence of the many scientists who have deciphered some of those mysteries and who continue today to build on those discoveries.  Over many years of reading books, I have learned to be a humble student and to persist in reading even when there are patches in a work that are beyond my comprehension.  In short, these are three books that have truly led and will lead this reader to wonder at and explore further the mystery of our universe and, indeed, the mystery of our minds that wonder at those vast spaces of the universe.  Incredible, indeed it is, to peruse and ponder the famous final image snapped by Voyager 1 in 1990.  That is a picture that shows our home planet, viewed from the distant realms of the solar system, to have shrunken to a single blue pixel on a digital photo, to become the famous pale blue dot just about discernible.  Incredible, too, to realise that on that minuscule pixel live some eight billion minds that wonder at the mystery of it all.