Merry Christmas to all readers of Sacred Space Astronomy here at www.vaticanobservatory.org!
This week I received a special Christmas present. A Universe of Earths: Our Planet and Other Worlds, from Copernicus to NASA was released by its publisher, Oxford University Press, to Google Books. Of course, this is not the first time I have made mention here at Sacred Space Astronomy of this new book by me and Dennis Danielson! Yes, I am excited about it.
CLICK HERE to view it in Google Books, starting with the cover. There is a significant amount of the book available to see, for free.
CLICK HERE for the Google Books overview that shows pages that Google selected for its own mysterious reasons.
OUP released the book in its academic electronic form (such as you might access from a university library) on December 8. That seems to be an auspicious official publication date, being the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. Perhaps I should have published this article to coincide with that. However, Google Books is much more accessible to most people.
When the print version is released in a few weeks, we will have an article here at Sacred Space Astronomy by Dennis.
A fun thing about this book is how much of its content comes from my work writing for the Vatican Observatory. If you read the book (please do! — you will not be disappointed) and if you have been reading this web site, you will recognize many ideas from my posts here. You will not recognize everything, for much of the book originates with Dennis rather than me. But you will recognize a lot.
That means that what you read here at www.vaticanobservatory.org can be cutting-edge stuff, because this book is full of new ideas. Dennis and I look at the idea of a universe full of other planets like our Earth. That is a really significant idea in the history of astronomy. It has a big influence on how we view the universe today. And Dennis and I argue that, while this idea is thought of as coming from science, science has never really supported it. You will not find a discussion like this in some other book.
Now let me throw in a strong disclaimer: I have found that some people hear this and immediately assume that any critical look at the idea of a universe full of other planets like our Earth is the same thing as advocating that there are no other planets like our Earth. We do not advocate that there are no other planets like our Earth. Nor do we urge that there are no other planets in the universe that are home to intelligent life like our Earth is.
What we do say is that the ideas we human beings have had about a universe of earths (and for centuries, astronomers both presumed that the universe would be full of other earths and told everybody that anyone with any sense at all would agree) have, from the start, not been supported by science.
We show that when Giordano Bruno proposed that the universe would be full of other earths orbiting other suns, the available scientific evidence clearly said otherwise. We illustrate this with the work of Johannes Kepler. Today we know that Kepler’s arguments against Bruno were erroneous. But no one at the time would have known that. Kepler’s arguments were based on measurements, made with the instruments then available, of the apparent diameters of stars. No one at the time knew that those diameters were spurious. Given the knowledge of the time, Kepler’s arguments were based on solid, reproducible science. He had science on his side. Bruno did not.
We also illustrate how, in the 19th century, science began to reveal the diversity within the universe. Planets were shown to be diverse — the planets of the solar system were shown not to be other earths. Stars were shown to be diverse — they were shown not to be all other suns. Meanwhile, a key idea necessary for a universe of other earths with life on them (and arguably, if a planet has no life at all it is not another earth) was shown to be bogus. That key idea was that life is an ordinary consequence of matter — an idea commonly referred to as “spontaneous generation” (where life spontaneously arises from inanimate matter).
This is important stuff. If stars and planets are not necessarily suns and earths, and if life is not a necessary consequence of matter, then that should say something about the probability that the universe is full of earths in Bruno fashion. But it seems that we humans hung on to the idea of a universe full of earths anyway — and ended up with a popular culture based on that idea: Superman (strange visitor from another planet), Star Wars, Star Trek, the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Dennis and I speculate about why that idea indeed hung on. We connect it to a certain tendency to see the earth as lowly or low — an idea that really belongs to the pre-Copernican view of the universe, not to the Copernican view. In the Copernican view, our Earth is a thing like Mars or Venus, namely a wandering star (that is, a planet) — and thus, in the classical sense, a star, and thus not a low thing.
I think I have outlined the main points of A Universe of Earths: Our Planet and Other Worlds, from Copernicus to NASA. I hope it gets you interested in reading the book. I will add that the book is printed in color, and it has some really lovely illustrations! And for a color hardback book, it is cheap! (The e-book version available through Google Books is even cheaper!) So please, get one. Get copies for all your friends!
Merry Christmas!
