Planet Cosmic Ocean

Planet Cosmic Ocean

The surface of our planet is the shore of the cosmic ocean.

The Cosmos is reach beyond measure, – in exquisite interrelationships, in elegant facts, in the subtle machinery of awe.

From the surface of the Earth we have learned most of what we know. And only recently we waded out to sea, enough to dampen our toes or, at most, wet our ankles. The ocean calls. And we see that the water seems inviting. We like the water. Some part of our being knows the water is from where we came. We long to return (these aspirations are not irreverent, although they may trouble whatever gods may be).

Anyway, the Earth is a place. It is by no means the only place. It is not even a typical place, because no star, or planet, or galaxy can by typical. The only typical place is within the vacuum…

Age and size of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. Image: © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

Age and Size of the Cosmos

The age and size of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be. In fact, our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stirs the human race, there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries, but we still know nothing about the Cosmos.

From a cosmic perspective, our concerns seem insignificant and even petty. But lost somewhere between immensity and eternity, our young and curious species who populate our tiny planetary home, is brave and shows much promise.

Indeed, in the last few millennia we have made the most astonishing and unexpected discoveries about the Cosmos and our place within it. We have made explorations that are exhilarating to consider and which remind us that humans have evolved to wonder.

Does the Earth Turn?

Does the Earth Turn?

The Platonists and their Christian successors held the peculiar notion that the Earth was tainted and somehow nasty, while the heavens were perfect and divine. The fundamental idea that the Earth is a planet, that we are citizens of the Universe, was rejected and forgotten. The fundamental idea that the Earth is a planet, that we are citizens of the Universe, was rejected and forgotten. This idea was first argued by Aristarchus, born on Samos three centuries after Pythagoras. Aristarchus was one of the last of the Ionian scientists.

By this time, the center of the intellectual enlightenment has moved to the great Library of Alexandria. Aristarchus was the first person to hold that the Sun rather than the Earth is at the center of the planetary system, that all the planets go around the Sun rather than the Earth is at the center of the planetary system, that all the planets go around the Sun rather than the Earth.

Typically, his writings on this matter are lost. . From the size of the Earth’s shadow on the Moon during a lunar eclipse, he deduced that the Sun had to be much larger than the Earth, as well as vary far away. He may then have reasoned that it is absurd for so large a body as the Sun to revolve around so small a body as the Earth. He put the Sun at the Center, made the Earth rotate on its axis once a day and orbit the Sun once a year.

It is 2,200 years since Aristarcus, and our language still pretends that the Earth does not turn. Image: © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

It is the same idea we associate with the name of Copernicus, whom Galileo described as “the restorer and confirmer”, not the inventor, of the heliocentric hypothesis. Copernicus may have gotten the idea from reading about Aristarchus. Recently discovered classical texts were a source of great excitement in Italian universities when Copernicus went to medical school there. In the manuscript of his book, Copernicus mentioned Aristarchus’ priority, but he omitted the citation before the book saw print. Copernicus wrote in a letter to Pope Paul III: “According to Cicero, Nicetas has thought the Earth was moved… According to Plutarch (who discusses Aristarchus)… certain others had held the same opinion. When from this, therefore, I had conceived its possibility, I myself also began to mediate upon the mobility of the Earth.

For most of the 1,800 years between Aristarchus and Copernicus nobody knew the correct disposition of the planets, even though it had been laid out perfectly clearly around 280 B.C. The idea outraged some of Aristarchus’ contemporaries. There were cries, like those voiced about Anaxogaras and Bruno and Galileo, that he be condemned for impiety. The resistance to Aristarchus and Copernicus, a kind of geocentrism in everyday life, remains with us : we still talk about the Sun “rising” and the Sun “setting”.

City and Biological Evolution

The City and Biological Evolution

Emotions and ritualized behavior patterns are built deeply into us. They are part of our humanity. But they are not characteristically human. Many other animals have feelings. What distinguishes our species is thought. The cerebral cortex is a liberation. We need no longer be trapped in the genetically inherited behavior patterns of lizards and baboons. We are, each of us, largely responsible for what gets put into our brains, for what, as adults, we wind up caring for and knowing about. No longer at the mercy of the reptile brain, we can change ourselves.

Most of the world’s great cities have grown haphazardly, little by little, in response to the needs of the moment; very rarely is a city planned for the remote future. The evolution of a city is like the evolution of the brain: it develops from a small center and slowly grows and changes, leaving many old parts still functioning.

There is no way for evolution to rip out the ancient interior of the brain because of its imperfections and replace it with something of more modern manufacture. The brain must function during the renovation. That is why our brainstem is surrounded by the R-complex, then the limbic system and finally the cerebral cortex. The old parts are in charge of too many fundamental functions for them to be replaced altogether. So they wheeze along, out-of-date and sometimes counterproductive, but a necessary consequence of our evolution.

City and Evolution. Image: Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

In New York City, the arrangement of many of the major streets dates to the seventeenth century, the stock exchange to the eighteenth century, the waterworks to the nineteenth, the electrical power system to the twentieth. The arrangement might be more efficient if all civic systems were constructed in parallel and replaced periodically (which is why disastrous fires – the great conflagrations of London and Chicago, for example – are sometimes an aid in city planning). But the slow accretion of new functions permits the city to work more or less continuously through the centuries.

In the seventeenth century you traveled between Brooklyn and Manhattan across the East River by ferry. In the nineteenth century, the technology became available to construct a suspension bridge across the river. It was built precisely at the site of the ferry terminal, both because the city owned the land and because major thoroughfares were already converging on the pre-existing ferry service.

Later when it was possible to construct a tunnel under the river, it too was built in the same place for the same reasons, and also because small abandoned precursors of tunnels called caissons, had already been emplaced during the construction of the bridge. This use and restructuring of previous systems for new purposes is very much like the pattern of biological evolution.

Another Space-Time

Another Space-Time

If you could somehow survive the gravitational tides and radiation flux, and (a likely assumption) if the black hole were rotating, it is just possible that you might emerge in another part of space-time – somewhere else in space, somewhen else in time. Such worm holes in space, a little like those in an apple, have been seriously suggested, although they have by no means been proved to exist. Might gravity tunnels provide a kind of interstellar or intergalactic subway, permitting us to travel to inaccessible places much more rapidly than we could in the ordinary way? Can black holes serve as time machines, carrying us to the remote past or the distant future? The fact that such ideas are being discussed even semi-seriously shows how surreal the universe may be.

We are, in the most profound sense, children of the Cosmos. Think of the Sun’s heat on your upturned face on a cloudless summer’s day; think how dangerous it is to gaze at the Sun directly. From 150 million kilometers away, we recognize its power. What would we feel on its seething self-luminous surface, or immersed in its heart of nuclear fire? The Sun warms us and feeds us and permits us to see. It fecundated the Earth. It is powerful beyond human experience. Birds greet the sunrise with an audible ecstasy. Even some one-celled organisms know to swim to the light. Our ancestors worshiped the Sun, and they were far from foolish. The early Sumerian pictograph for god was an asterisk, the symbol of the stars. The Aztec word for god was Teotl, and its glyph was a representation of the Sun. The heavens were called the Teoatl, the godsea, the cosmic ocean.

And yet the Sun is an ordinary, even a mediocre star. If we must worship a power greater than ourselves, does it not make sense to revere the Sun and stars? Hidden within every astronomical investigation, sometimes so deeply buried that the researcher himself is unaware of its presence, lies a kernel of awe.

The Sun in Victoria Park, Toronto. Photo: Elena.

Isaac Newton

Isaac Newton

The lifelong quest of Kepler, to understand the motions of the planet, to seek a harmony in the heavens culminated thirty-six years after his death in the work of Isaac Newton.

Newton was born on Christmas Day, 1642, so tiny, that, as his mother told him years later, he would have fit into a quart mug. Sickly, feeling abandoned by his parents, quarrelsome, unsociable, a virgin to the day he died, Isaac Newton was perhaps the greatest scientific genius who ever lived.

Even as a young man, he was impatient with insubstantial questions, such as whether light was “a substance or an accident”, or how gravitation could act over an intervening vacuum. He early decided that the conventional Christian belief in the Trinity was a misreading of Scripture. According to his biographer John Maynard Keynes, “he was rather a Judaic Monotheist of the school of Maimonides. He arrived at this conclusion, not on so-to-speak rational or sceptical grounds, but entirely on the interpretation of ancient authority. He was persuaded that the revealed documents gave no support to the Trinitarian doctrines which were due to late falsifications. The revealed God was one God. But this was a dreadful secret, which Newton was at desperate pains to conceal all his life.

I accomplished my discoveries by thinking upon them. Image: © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

Like Kepler, Newton was not immune to the superstitions of his day and had many encounters with mysticism. Indeed, much of Newton’s intellectual development can be attributed to this tension between rationalism and mysticism. At the Stourbridge Fair in 1663, at age twenty, he purchased a book on astrology, “out of a curiosity to see what there was in it”. He read it until he came to an illustration which he could not understand, because he was ignorant of trigonometry. So he purchased a book on trigonometry, but soon found himself unable to follow the geometrical arguments. So he found a copy of Euclid’s Elements of Geometry, and began to read. Two years later he invented the differential calculus.

As a student Newton was fascinated by light and transfixed by the Sun. He took to the dangerous practice of staring at the Sun’s image in a looking glass:

In a few hours I had brought my eyes to such a pass that I could look upon no bright objects with neither eye, but I saw the Sun before me, so that I durst neither write nor read but to recover the use of my eyes shut my self up in my chamber made dark three days together and used all means to divert my imagination from the Sun. For if I thought upon him I presently saw his picture though I was in the dark.

In 1666, at the age of twenty-three, Isaac Newton was an undergraduate at Cambridge University when an outbreak of plague forced him to spend a year in idleness in the isolated village of Woolsthorpe, where he had been born. He occupied himself by inventing the differential and integral calculus, making fundamental discoveries on the nature of light and laying the foundation for the theory of universal gravitation. The only other year lit it in the history of physics was Einstein’s “Miracle Year” of 1905. When asked how he accomplished his astonishing discoveries, Newton replied unhelpfully, “By thinking upon them”. His work was so significant that his teacher at Cambridge, Isaac Barrow, resigned his chair of mathematics in favor of Newton five years after the young student returned to college.