Physics Today, November 2006, pages 57-58

Books 

The View from the Center of the Universe: Discovering Our
Extraordinary Place in the Cosmos

    Joel R. Primack and Nancy Ellen Abrams
    Riverhead Books, New York, 2006. $26.95 (386 pp.). ISBN 1-59448-914-9

    Reviewed by Michael S. Turner

    During graduate school, when I was shifting fields from particle
    physics to astrophysics, I decided to read an elementary book on
    astronomy to get the lay of the land. What I learned depressed me:
    We humans occupy an insignificant place in the grand scheme of
    things, and there is no evidence that the universe has taken or
    should take note of us. I suspect many other scientists, as well
    as nonscientists, have had a similar experience. Carl Sagan summed
    it up well: "We live on a hunk of rock and metal that orbits a
    humdrum star in the obscure outskirts of an ordinary
    galaxy"—and he said it before dark matter and dark energy were
    discovered and were found to account for 96% of the stuff in the
    universe.

    In The View from the Center of the Universe: Discovering Our
    Extraordinary Place in the Cosmos, Joel Primack, a leading
    cosmologist and professor of physics at the University of
    California, Santa Cruz, and his wife Nancy Ellen Abrams, a lawyer,
    writer, and musician, tell us that this cosmic alienation has its
    roots in the Copernican and Newtonian revolutions and a Faustian
    deal brokered by René Descartes and Francis Bacon. In the wake
    of Galileo's bad experience with the Catholic Church, scientists
    adopted a policy of noninterference with religion, dividing the
    world into the material (realm of science) and the spiritual
    (realm of religion). This division allowed science to flourish
    unfettered. And flourish it did—with profound advances in our
    understanding of nature, from quarks to the cosmos, and dramatic
    advances in our quality of life, from electricity and medicine to
    science-based agriculture and today's quantum-based information
    economy.

    Yet Primack and Abrams argue that the bargain had a significant
    downside: the severing of humankind's connection with the
    universe. They also contend that the present revolutionary period
    of cosmic discovery is the right time to re-establish a widely
    shared cosmological myth that connects us to the
    universe. Reconciliation 400 years after a messy divorce is not
    easy; but with their complementary backgrounds and a decade of
    jointly teaching a course on cosmology and culture at Santa Cruz,
    this husband-and-wife team is well qualified to start the
    conversation.

    The book is divided into three parts. The first part is a review
    of the cosmological myths that preceded the divorce of science and
    religion, from the cosmology of ancient Egypt to the heavenly
    spheres that survived from Ptolemy to the Middle Ages. The second
    part is an exposition of our present understanding of the
    universe; it focuses on recent breakthroughs such as inflation,
    dark matter, and dark energy. The third part is an exploration of
    how we might take advantage of this quantum leap in our knowledge
    to reconnect with the universe, and even learn lessons from the
    universe. In the authors' words, "think cosmically, act globally."
    The book also contains 75 pages of notes that provide expanded
    discussion and references—both on cosmology and
    philosophy. These extensive notes are a testimony to the authors'
    scholarship and style.

    The discussion of contemporary cosmology is built around five
    simple and engaging questions: What is the universe made of? What
    is the "center of the universe"? What size is the universe? Where
    do we come from? Are we alone? By and large, Primack and Abrams's
    approach works, yet I would fault this part of the book a bit for
    its brevity and lack of illustrations. The authors give short
    shrift to some important topics—for example, the origin of
    symmetry between matter and antimatter. I also have some quibbles,
    for instance, with odd assignments of credit for the introduction
    of supersymmetric dark matter and inflation. Given the brevity of
    this part of the book, I believe the authors would have better
    served readers by staying away from the always difficult and
    contentious area of saying who did what when.

    The most interesting twist in their presentation, one well suited
    to their larger goal, is the re-centering of humankind in the
    story. Our physical size is the almost geometric mean of the
    largest thing we can imagine, the visible universe, and the
    smallest thing we can rationally discuss, the Planck scale. We are
    made of the rarest substance in the universe, atoms beyond helium,
    which accounts for less than 0.1% of the universe. Last but not
    least, the authors replace the heavenly spheres of Ptolemy with
    spheres of time, which is appropriate to our isotropic and
    homogeneous universe, and locate us at the center of time since
    both our galaxy and Sun are in their middle ages.

    It is part three, on the quest to find meaning from our deepened
    knowledge of the cosmos, that sets the book apart from other
    popular accounts of the new cosmology. Primack and Abrams present
    three examples of how we might reconnect by learning from our
    cosmic evolution. One example involves gravity and
    wealth. Galaxies, stars, and all cosmic structures are around only
    because "matter-rich" (higher density) and "matter-poor" (lower
    density) regions in the universe existed early on. The attractive
    effect of gravity makes matter-rich regions richer and matter-poor
    regions poorer. After billions of years, the phenomenon led to
    bound structures such as our own Milky Way galaxy. Essential to
    the success of this process is the fact that the inequities were
    modest because gravity would cause extremely overdense regions to
    immediately pinch off the space around them and form black holes.

    The lesson the authors glean about wealth concentration from their
    discussion of the effect of gravity is clear: modest wealth
    concentration can lead to good consequences; excessive wealth
    concentration can have disastrous effects. As Primack and Abrams
    aspire to obtain deeper meaning from our knowledge of the
    universe, they recognize they are battling an existential
    alternative, the one that depressed me as a graduate student and
    is well articulated in Steven Weinberg's influential text
    Gravitation and Cosmology: Principles and Applications of the
    General Theory of Relativity (Wiley, 1972): "The more
    comprehensible the universe becomes, the more pointless it seems."

    The View from the Center of the Universe has big ambitions and a
    novel approach for conveying the content and excitement of the
    current revolution in cosmology. I know of no other book that
    explains eternal inflation using a Las Vegas analogy, quotes
    freely from cosmologist Andrei Linde and mythologist Joseph
    Campbell, and discusses the neurological basis of the human use of
    metaphor. This book may disappoint the most ardent followers of
    cosmology who are interested in reading more about the latest
    developments in the field. And when it comes to reconnecting
    humankind with the universe, it is still very much a work in
    progress. Nonetheless, Primack and Abrams's book is well written
    and thought provoking. The View from the Center of the Universe
    may even add significantly to ongoing discussions of the proper
    relationship between science and everything else—including
    religion.

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