Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(30)
4 star:		(16)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

When I first came to these reviews, the only one was entitled "Physics Fluff", gave the book one star, and panned it based on "I flipped through this book at a bookstore and then read the Publisher's Weekly review." Having just heard Primack and Abrams speak on the book at a Stanford Physics Department Colloquium and been very impressed, I worried that people might miss the important messages they convey because of such negative comments based on a cursory review of the materials. While I am only a few chapters into the book and would normally wait to write a review (though I did hear the authors' 90 minute talk which summarizes their work), I feel it necessary to immediately counter an impression based on an even less thorough reading.

Primack has dared to explore territory where few scientists venture. (Abrams is an attorney, writer and poet, so we scientists expect her to be a bit strange - and probably wrong.) Primack and Abrams have written a book that weaves a tale of science, myth, and ethics. Mixing soft subjects with the hard sciences goes against religious doctrine - scientific religious doctrine, that is. And, as with most religions, this dogmatic approach is usually invisible to its adherents. Even though the authors are careful to distinguish the hard science from the softer areas, this is a dangerous mixture to introduce into a scientific culture.

For example, at the Physics Department Colloquium I attended, this problem was manifested during the Q&A period following the talk. People asked only about neutrinos, cosmic expansion, how we can see objects 40 billion light years away when the Universe is only 15 billion years old, etc. Primack the physicist answered all these questions expertly, while Abrams the poet stood largely mute and ignored although she had had equal time during the talk and had hit on a number of critical points - but all on the "soft" side. I racked my brain trying to come up with a question that would draw attention to the truths she had voiced and that would be appropriate in this temple of science, but could not. Instead, when I was recognized, I stated that conundrum and lamented the fact that we limit ourselves in this manner. That at least brought some recognition to Abrams' contribution and the problem we face.

In this book, there is something much deeper underlying all the wonderful cosmological physics that is beautifully explained. We live at a critical time and the fate of the earth hangs in the balance as our technological progress far outstrips our social and moral development. While to my mind, this is a scientifically established fact (e.g., see http://www-ee.stanford.edu/~hellman/breakthrough.html), other scientists will disagree.

This is not the place to argue whether or not the larger worldview espoused by Primack and Abrams, and to which I subscribe, is correct. Rather, I encourage you to read their excellent book, with one proviso. If it makes you mad to see science discussed outside of a narrow box of numbers and equations, as I suspect was the case for the reviewer mentioned above, do not read this book. There is enough anger in the world already.

But if you truly believe there is one Universe as opposed to art and science each inhabiting separate worlds (even though it is extremely difficult for our intellects to see their connection), then I heartily recommend this book. If you are scientifically trained, you may still, as I did, occasionally get a queasy feeling and want to cry out "Hey wait! How can they say that?" But, if you keep an open mind, more often than not, the second part of that interjection will be answered in a way that opens new vistas. Even in the few chapters I have read thus far, I have been well rewarded with new ideas and viewpoints.

P.S. While the audience at the Colloquium asked only hard science questions and largely ignored Abrams during the Q&A, the large stack of books that the Stanford Bookstore had on sale afterward sold very well. Also, many people came up and asked her questions after the formal Q&A was completed. So there is more hope than that story might first indicate.

P.P.S. I have since finished the book and stand by my earlier review, above. No changes were needed. The only thing I would add is that I learned some very interesting physics from the book. For example, it presents a very simple and understandable explanation for why physicists now believe that the majority of matter in the universe is "dark matter."

This book is really several books, two of which are quite good, and the third of which has major limitations. Part One of the book summarizes some traditional myths about the nature of the universe from different Western cultures. Part Two of the book is an informed, well-written summary of current scientific theories of the makeup, shape, size, and origin of the universe. Part Three tries to argue that these theories can give greater meaning to human life.

Parts One and Two are quite good. I believe most readers will gain a great deal of knowledge both about various cultures' myths about the universe, and modern scientific theories of the universe. I particularly liked the discussion in Part Two about how what is scientifically true depends upon the scale one is considering, and how this helps explain why many modern theories of physics are quite counter-intuitive: human intuition is made to deal with the human scale, and not the scales of quarks or galactic super-clusters.

Part Three is strained. Primack and Abrams want to somehow argue that modern theories of cosmology somehow give greater meaning and direction to human lives. I don't think they make a good case for this argument. They argue that modern cosmology shows that we are "central" to the universe, which is supposed to give us more of a sense of meaning. However, they use "central" in such a vague way that this isn't very convincing. We are told that we are "central" because we are made of rare elements and because we live in a rare bubble of space-time. So, being unusual is here defined as being "central". We also are told that we are central because we are at the middle of all sizes, in that the ratio of human sized to the minimum Planck length is of similar order of magnitude to the ratio of the size of our universe to human size. So here we are central because we are at a geometric midpoint. We are also told we are central because we are at the midpoint in the life of our planet, and the midpoint of the portion of the life of the universe in which many galaxies are visible. So here, centrality is an arithmetic midpoint in time, in which the endpoints are somewhat arbitrarily chosen. (Why wouldn't we consider the life of the universe after dark energy has moved most galaxies beyond what we can see?) We are also central because we are at the center of the universe visible to us, which also would be true at all other points in our universe. So, centrality is used in so many different senses that I think the term loses any meaning. Finally, why should we care if we are central in any of these senses of that term? I don't see why being rare, or at a geometric midpoint in size, or arithmetic midpoint in time, gives some great inherent meaning to human life.

Also in Part Three, Primack and Abrams seems to want to make an argument that the nature of the universe somehow gives a guide to what we should be trying to do with human society. So, because the universe initially inflated, and then slowed down to a more moderate expansion, this somehow is supposed to provide support for the notion that economic growth needs to slow down to avoid overusing resources. Whatever the case to be made for humans to do a better job of conserving scarce resources that are inadequately protected by the private market, such as ecosystems or the global climate - and I certainly agree we need to do a better job - I don't think that this policy issue has anything to do with cosmological theories. They also seem to imply that once we recognize the extremely long past and future life of the universe, that this will somehow point to the need for human society to take a longer-term perspective. Again, I agree that our society could benefit from a longer term perspective, but I doubt whether the case for our society taking a longer-term perspective depends upon the universe being 14 billion years old, with at least that long to go.

So, in the end, this book overreaches. When it sticks to what the authors know something about, which is different theories of the universe, it is quite good. When it tries to use this knowledge to help guide current human actions, the book is disappointing.

This book attempts to place current advances in cosmology into a modern mythology that would restore the central importance to human beings in the scientific view of the world. Many readers will find this a little flakey, particularly where the argument is thin (Kabbala). But I found it thought provoking and very well written. Even if you are a hard core science buff you might find this worth your time because the author studied with Marcea Eliade at Chicago. Very original and very thoughtful in my opinion.There is nothing like it on the market that I know of worth reading. I think it may find a solid readership in time.

In addition, this book benefits from having been written for a humanities course given at Santa Cruz. This may be the best introduction to modern cosmology in that it takes the time to clarify fundamental points about dark energy and matter and aspects of inflation that are often bungled in better known and more sophisticated texts. It is clear that the authors have spent a lot of time answering questions from confused students. The care is appreciated; I wish more of these texts were so well edited. An excellent place to start. It comes with a strong recommendation from Paul Davies whose recent Cosmic Jackpot is also excellent.

I am writing this as a first impression and to counter the poor review. I have just purchased the book and have had time for a quick overview. I think the poor review is unfair to this book.

The authors central insight is how we as humans need to use metaphor to understand concepts and events that are not on our scale. He has a very good overview of what we know of cosmic and quantum theory and how they are related. It is very up-to-date on our current understanding of such things as inflationary universe and string theory. It's comparable to most other current books out there on the topic. It IS very philosophical but not religious. It uses religious metaphor so it is easy to think its some mush book trying to meld current religion with science. It makes quite clear that the religious metaphor is metaphor that we are applying to something we don't understand. It gives insight into why we use metaphor in the way we do and how to properly understand it. (we misattribute things that happen on our scale to a larger scale. Such as attributing thought, which happens on the scale of our neural connections with something larger such as weather patterns.) But also goes on to provide deeper insight as to how our metaphors are true. It shows how our wonderful and unimaginably huge the creative process is in the inflationary universe but also how we are wrong to attribute "father in the sky" attributes to it. This is not a mushy spiritual book but I think quite the opposite. Its not trying to scientifically prove god and such but just the opposite trying to showing how we are wrong to apply our scale concepts to the universe and that what is true is much bigger than we imagine.

I will update this as soon as i finish the book.

PS. I have finished the book and stand by what i stated above.

This book has resolved my personal quest of almost 50 years.

My first search into what I now call `cosmological science' was over 50 years ago. Every since my college days, I asked myself the question: "What is the universe and how do I fit into it?"

In the past few years, I've have read how astronomers and cosmologists were getting very close to answers to these basic questions. In the past decade, satellite observations from Hubble plus data from many Earth and satellite telescope systems have been looking at the heavens over a much greater frequency range than the visible spectrum. In addition, astronomers were becoming confident that their measurements from supernova were giving accurate measure of the expansion of the universe. Now we also understand the `snow' we see on our TV sets is just reception of radio signals that were caused by the cosmic background noise. And that goes almost all the way back to the Big Bang.

What does that have to do with this book? Well, in this recently published book (2006), the authors have taken and pieced together the major pieces of the cosmological puzzle: Who are we and where we are going?

The book is separated into three parts: The first part, three chapters, is a historical sequence of how man and mankind adopted to his environment. This part reviews religious icons, myths and mysticism. If this makes you uncomfortable, I suggest you move on to what I consider the 'main event' in Part Two. I'll warn you now: There are a lot of footnotes, sometimes 4 or 5 for each page of text. I recommend, as the authors do, that you try to read all the bold numbers as soon as possible on the page since they hold significant background or clarification information. Some of the notes are quite detailed and can be more than a page long, but are necessary in the authors' development of the facts of the subject discussed.

One of the most profound statements that I found in this book is that there is a very good chance the human race is a unique event in the history of the universe. The chance of another high level civilization existing 'out there' is very, very remote. We're alone!!

That leads to the last portion of this book, and why I think it is so terribly important. Public media, TV, magazines and newspapers have had a lot of dialog lately about how humans are not doing a very good job of preserving our planet. This book suggests that the problem is bigger than the limited view of our environment. The authors suggest that humans and their civilization can and MUST change but we have to change our way of thinking and approaching the problem.

The solution is out there: The authors only invite us to seek it in our own way.

I thought that the message in this book was important enough to purchase a copy for each of my children. My hope is that after they have finished the reading we could some good interesting dialog concerning each of our impressions of the universe as it now is, and our place in it

I found The View from the Center of the Universe to be ambitious, exciting and hugely creative. No doubt it will encounter much belittlement from folks like the person who reviewed for Kirkus, because it presents a cosmic view that is deeply challenging. Its lack of cynicism makes it an easy target, but don't be fooled ... these authors are making a very serious-minded contribution. Read it with an open mind, and it just might influence the way you look at life. It has opened my eyes to a whole new take on the nature of reality. Thank you Primack and Abrams!

Don't believe the ludicrous Publishers Weekly review or the guy who flipped through it at the bookstore. Sure if you only believe that science should be technical, boring, and for other scientists you won't like this book. If you are a science fundamentalist (yes, they exist, and they are as fanatical as their religious counterparts) you won't like this book. BUT if you are open to see how solid, cutting edge science can transform the way you see the world and your place in it, then don't miss this book. This book IS the purpose of science. It is why we spend millions of dollars studying the distant universe--not just for the intellectual interest of a few specialists, but because understanding the universe is vitally important to our life in it. The authors--Joel Primack helped discover Cold Dark Matter (what's the PW reviewers claim to scientific fame) and Nancy Abrams invented scientific mediation for the Congress (no slouch either)--not only give a scientifically sound and up-to-date take on the perennial questions about the universe, they also help us to see how these "laws of physics" relate to our life on this planet. Fascinating discussions on the relationship between gravity and money and between cosmic inflation and the environment transformed the way I see money and the environment. This book is big and bold and trying to do pioneering work, which will inevitably attract carpers and small-minded detracters. Don't listen to them. This book could matter to you and to generations to come like few science books. Someday this book may very well be seen as the beginning of a cultural shift. It is not written like a greating card, but with grace and true literary skill, which unfortunately sets it apart from most science books. The style is fully accessible and there are 70 pages of endnotes for anyone who wants to learn more about the technical science they cover. If you are curious about what the recent discoveries of the universe might mean to finding your place in it, if you have a spiritual life and want it to have some relationship to the real universe you live in, or if you care about the global challenges we face, don't miss this opportunity to truly expand your horizons by millions of light years. With these two authors as your guides, you will see your place in the universe differently. Read, explore, imagine. Don't stay in the dark, cold, empty universe of Copernicus. He didn't know better. With the new technology and with Abrams and Primack leading the way, you can.

When I was in my early teens, I had sleepless nights because of a TV documentary about the millions of "invisible" organisms which live in our hair, on our skin, and within our bodies, quite unbeknown to us. I lay awake not because I was frightened, but excited. Magnified tremendously, this broadcast showed them crawling around like dinosaurs, complete with scaly flanks and barbed tentacles. Like most boys of my generation, I was fascinated by the prospect of discovering alien life, yet here was something equally intriguing - and it was real! And right under my nose. Well, under my fingernails when I scratched myself.

What if those organisms, in turn, had similar parasites? And what if they, in turn, did? Scaled in the other direction, what if we humans were blind to the fact that we existed on some giant creature's epidermis? Which, in turn . . . well, you get the picture. These ideas lurked and never really congealed into something solid until, yesterday, I read Primack and Abram's masterful book. "The View from the Center of the Universe" attempts nothing less than a plain English explanation of our place in the cosmos, fusing Primack's `hard science' astronomy with Abram's metaphorising to create a compelling Turquoise cosmology: something that builds upon purple's creation myths, red's desire for centrality, blue's insistence on truth, orange's quantification & testability and green's yearning for wholeness.

What impressed me most about this book were the way the authors addressed `simple' questions like, "What is a human?" Their answer? "I can trace my lineage back 14 billion years through generations of stars. My atoms were created in stars, blown out in stellar winds or massive explosions, and soared for millions of years through space to become part of a newly forming solar system - my solar system. And back before those creator stars, there was a time when the particles that at this very moment make up my body and brain were mixing in an amorphous cloud of dark matter and quarks. Intimately woven into me are billions of bits of information that had to be encoded and tested and preserved to create me. Billions of years of cosmic evolution have produced me" (p. 281 italics in original)

It's hard to know to summarise a book I found unputdownable; almost every second page is dog-eared and underlined. Primack and Abrams speak through vivid images, stories and metaphors. Just one of these is the Cosmic Uborubos - picture a circular snake eating its own tail. From tail to fangs are the the 60 orders of magnitude between the smallest subatomic particles and the largest superclusters of galaxies. As humans, we are roughly halfway around and our sensory apparatus is tuned to pick up just a narrow sliver (from a millimetre or so, up to the size of large mountains). This range of 6 or so orders of magnitude are the realm which we consider `reality', where `common sense' works and physical intuition is reliable. The remaining 54 orders of magnitude are only available to us `with assistance': the microscope, the telescope, or mathematics and physics.

For those readers who also know about memes and theories like spiral dynamics, Primack and Abrams offer a Second Tier cosmology which fuses well verified scientific theories like relativity and evolution with those less well tested yet accepted: particle physics (subatomic particles don't exist per se, they have energy states which generate probability clouds); double dark theory (dark energy and cold dark matter fill 95% of the `space' which most of us imagine is the universe - I always thought it was a vacuum, a nothing), cosmic inflation (an explanation of how we got from the Big Bang to the irregularities which created hundreds of billions of galaxies such as our Milky Way) and the fractal theory of biological scaling (which explains why we humans can't possibly be a critter on the skin of a larger critter - they'd never be able to evolve a circulatory system large enough).

So far, this sounds like a science book right? Wrong. This is where the partnership between the authors comes in. They're a husband and wife team who teach a course at the University of California called `Cosmology and Culture'. What is a cosmology? It is "a social consensus on how to think about whatever is out there" (p. 19). A bit like memes. Especially v-memes. For example, a tremendously successful purple culture, which we call Ancient Egypt, developed a cosmology based upon multiple non-dogmatic myths, with no requirement for consistency. Monotheistic (blue) religions today continue to offer a view of the universe which many accept today: an omnipotent God, who inhabits some higher sphere, creates earth from the firmament and populates it. The inherent cosmology of most educated Westerners is the materialist (orange) Newtonian model: a sense of `cosmic homelessness' based on a view that we live on a small rock circling an insignificant heap of gas within an immense vacuum punctuated by other similar gaseous clouds and balls of rock. Green cosmologies also exist: they posit a universal `energy' or some intangible (and unprovable) universal harmonic or pulse which we can connect with should we choose to do so.

This is where Primack and Abrams shine: their move to a Second Tier cosmology which binds the scientific with the mythic. The former recognises that we have the ability, increasingly, to quantify, to test and to reason. (Some of the developments in astronomy and physics since I saw that TV documentary as a teenager 30 years ago are almost beyond belief). The latter recognises that we must develop a shared set of stories and meanings which may, one day, enable us to harness our joint efforts in the interests of saving the only planet we know of which has evolved consciousness. In a nutshell, this book's great contribution is its ability to help us integrate cosmic ideas into our lives. It's the most readable "turquoise" book I've found yet.

I'm a typical twentieth century skeptic born to a time when new discoveries made all religions seem like Santa Claus. Searching for a "religion" that agreed with scientific truth might seem to be an impossible task, but this book says it is imperative. How can you believe in science and believe mankind has a central role to play in the universe? How can you "feel" to be part of this world? I used to look at the moon, and read about cosmology, and then wonder how it could connect with me doing the laundry or buying groceries. Where is the connection? This books takes a first step.

I can't make up my mind who this book is trying to reach; the fundamentalists or the godless scientists. The fundamentalists need the dose of wonder-through-cosmology to replace their biblical literacy and, I presume, the non-religious need an alternative to the horrors of existentialism. Falling in the latter camp (except for the existential bit) I find the voodoo-hoodoo dredged up from human pre-science a bit too much like speaking in tongues. The authors attempt to create a set of symbols to go with this new science/religion as a way to achieve some sort of primal archetype substitution. We have to wait until page 276 and 277 to find out about the new God where suddenly He is mentioned 22 times. The big news is that the authors believe "in God as nothing less than the process of opening our personal lines of contact with the unknown potential of the universe". O.K., at least there's nothing in there about rewarding jihadis with 72 virgins, but how much does science have to whittle down the God thing before we dispose of it once and for all?
Lest anyone should think my take-away from this book is all negative let me close on a positive note by recommending it as a good brush-up and review of current cosmology. Many of the concepts such as scale and time bias are worthy of serious thought. It is always a good thing to be reminded of the utter weirdness of the universe.