This week we have a guest writer, Dennis Danielson.
He is co-author with me of the new book, A Universe of Earths,
that we are both rather excited about.
Dennis is professor emeritus of English at the University of British Columbia.
In addition to four authored books, he edited The Book of the Cosmos: Imagining the Universe from Heraclitus to Hawking (Perseus Books, 2000) and received the 2011 Konrad Adenauer Research Prize from Germany’s Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.
The illustration at top, from an 1640 book by John Wilkins, is one of Dennis’s favorites, and it features prominently in our book. The phrase “Another Planet” that appears in the Wilkins illustration of course refers to the Earth. “Planet Earth” was still a very novel idea in 1640.
Happy New Year! As Chris Graney announced in his December 20 blog for Sacred Space Astronomy, his and my coauthored book, A Universe of Earths: Our Planet and Other Worlds, from Copernicus to NASA, has just been released by Oxford University Press. When he wrote it was out in electronic form. Now, as of January 7, the print version is out and can be purchased from OUP directly (click here for it). Other booksellers may or may not have it stocked yet.
And Chris is right that we’re both excited about it, maybe even a little inclined to brag. To wit, my very best idea was to conceive of this book in the first place, but my next best idea was to ask Chris to coauthor it with me. I’ve since heard plenty of stories about coauthors having fallings out or even learning to positively dislike each other. But my relationship with Chris has been a dream.* The book is a thoroughly and harmoniously coauthored one. And I defy anyone (apart from our highly perceptive spouses) to say “This sentence or section is definitely Chris’s” or “This is definitely Dennis’s.” It’s all one happy weaving together of research and insights by a deceptively young-looking* American Catholic astronomer and an older-by-the-day Canadian Protestant historian of ideas.
As Chris already hinted, to some extent A Universe of Earths is a “myth-busting” book. We take pleasure in critiquing a number of things that we’ve all been told but that just ain’t so.
For one thing, it’s not true that Copernicus “dethroned” the Earth by removing it from the center of the Universe (of course it wasn’t actually there to start with). In fact, the Copernican model exalted Earth — raised it up to the status of the planets, those bright wandering stars that shine in the heavens and bear divinity-inflected names like Venus, Mars, and Jupiter. Thus to pull Earth up out of what earlier ages had considered the putrid lower storey of the Universe (the Renaissance savant Giovanni Pico called it the “excrementary and filthy parts of the lower world”) was no demotion at all. Indeed, in the Copernican model, Earth is seen as a star in more senses than one.
It’s also not true that those Jesuit scientists who initially opposed the new Copernican Sun-centered (“heliocentric”) model were “science-deniers.” Seventeenth-century thinkers like Christoph Scheiner and Giovanni Battista Riccioli observed that there was no discernible annual stellar parallax and so inferred that “fixed” stars in the heavens had to be greater in diameter than the diameter of the whole orbit that Earth (according to Copernicus) describes about the Sun. Obviously, you shouldn’t accept a so-called scientific theory that implies something completely preposterous! This is careful observation and good logic, not “science denial.”
It’s furthermore wrong to claim as a brilliant scientific insight Giordano Bruno’s theory that the stars are other suns with other earths revolving around them. Sure, it’s an interesting idea — just ask any fan of Star Trek, Star Wars, or the innumerable other films and sci-fi stories that make the same assumption. But there was no scientific observation to support the idea, and there still isn’t any.
In this connection, Chris and I have a bit of fun with some of the standard rhetorical maneuvers employed by proponents of “plurality” — of belief in the existence of “other worlds.” For example, it is often said that “absence of evidence [of other worlds] is not evidence of absence.” That’s obviously true. But our stubborn insistence is that absence of evidence is absence of evidence! The point is that you can’t call a theory scientific unless you offer some evidence to support it.
The fact, furthermore, that 60-plus years of SETI (the rigorous search for extraterrestrial intelligence) has indeed not produced any evidence for the existence of ETI might just count as evidence for something — not of course for the nonexistence of ETI, but surely for its sheer cosmic or galactic scarcity, or just plain inaccessibility as far as Earth-dwellers are concerned.
Finally, we acknowledge that, from Copernicus to the present, with an increasing recognition of the vastness of the Universe has come a greater and greater awareness of how very small Earth and its inhabitants are by comparison. So what does this unarguable process imply for Earth’s — and humankind’s — cosmic significance? Often there’s a strong but rather simple-minded tendency to presume that smallness must imply insignificance.
But Johannes Kepler, early in the 1600s, already tackled this issue. On a cosmic scale, he recognized, Earth is tiny. And even smaller than Earth are “these fine bits of dust called human beings; to whom the Creator has granted such, that in a certain way they may beget themselves, clothe themselves, arm themselves, teach themselves infinite arts, and daily work toward the better; in whom is the image of God; who are, in a certain way, lords of the whole bulk. [Yet] who among us would choose a body the breadth of the universe in exchange for no soul?”
So part of what our book resists is a tendency among “other worlds” proponents across the centuries to cast aspersions on us and our precious and possibly unique planet on account of our smallness. In the late nineteenth century, that sort of misanthropic undercurrent continued to be a standard feature of much “other worlds” thinking. Many who challenged it were vilified as weak-minded. Pluralism became almost an orthodoxy of its own. In the words of Rev. (later Cardinal) John Henry Newman, “In the controversy about the Plurality of worlds, it has been considered … to be so necessary that the Creator should have filled with living beings the luminaries which we see in the sky … that it almost amounts to a blasphemy to doubt it.” The poet Alfred Lord Tennyson, for example, attacked William Whewell, a chief scientific opponent of pluralism, declaring it to be “inconceivable that the whole Universe was merely created for us who live in this third-rate planet of a third-rate sun.”
The positive thrust of our book, by contrast, is that, from Copernicus to NASA, we have accumulated impressive scientific evidence that supports the view of Earth as a first-rate planet, a glorious wandering star, one that might still render us awe-struck, delighted, and grateful.
*I told Dennis to write freely, and so I am making no edits here. For once he gets to say what he wants without my comments! All I can say is no, I did not pay him to say this flattering stuff.
E-book versions of our book are currently quite inexpensive — under $15! Click here for the Google version. Click here for the Kindle version.
