The Book of the Cosmos

edited by Dennis Richard Danielson

Introduction: Telescopes for the Mind

Canadian cosmologist Werner Israel tells of the time he was interviewed for a television show by someone who had carefully prepared a list of questions to ask him about lipstick, blusher, and mascara. Although the kinship between cosmology and cosmetology probably did little to advance the career of that interviewer, it actually helps me here to introduce an idea central to the purpose of this book. In lecturing about cosmology I sometimes try to break the ice by asking how many members of the audience wear cosmetics--and then I take advantage of their candor by pointing out that our word cosmeticsderives from the Greek verb meaning "to bring order out of chaos." My point, simply, is that cosmology, like its etymological cousin cosmetology, is indeed about order, and about beauty.

Are we not drawn to the heavens in the first place because they are beautiful and because they are awesome? Their grandeur humbles us, thrills us, calls forth our contemplation, and inspires a craving (as Alan Guth has put it) "that has been part of human consciousness from the writing of Genesis to the scientific era of relativity and quantum mechanics." What is the cosmos? How did it come into being? How are we related to it, and what is our place in it? Furthermore, when we contemplate the universe, isn't what we see and experience molded by what others of our species have seen and thought elsewhere and before us? What I see is in large measure an amalgam of what we see and have seen--and it is a very long and complex we. From the beginning of human history, others have looked at and spoken and written about this cosmos that is the object of our awe and our contemplation. And, to echo Wordsworth, the world is rich and dear to us both for itself and for the sake of those others who have preceded us and shaped our vision.

To make available and audible the voices of some of "those others"--of exceptional minds across time who have spoken and written about the cosmos--is this book's principal aim. Although we most naturally talk about looking at the heavens, the essence of The Book of the Cosmos is more precisely the process of thinking that is mediated by writing and reading about the cosmos. Important as pictures are to our understanding of the universe, they can often virtually bypass our critical faculties and make us feel as if we have understood something, when actually the "vision" that moves and inspires us goes far beyond the pictorial. What I offer here, therefore, are cosmologists' voices as embodied in their writings, accompanied by only a small handful of pictures. Employing a capacious and non-technical definition of cosmology--discourse concerned with the cosmos and with cosmic questions--I have selected these writings using a number of criteria both objective and subjective. But above all, I have chosen readings I think succeed in evoking that very mixture of the beautiful and the awesome which draws us to contemplate this great universe in the first place.

By contemplate I don't, however, imply passive observation. Part of the beauty of literature, including cosmological literature, is its capacity to join author and reader in active contemplation--in acts of imagination and acts of interpretation. It will be clear from Chapter 1 onwards how persistent is the idea that we can hear the heavens speak, and that the cosmos is a book which we can read. The same profound analogy of verbal communication undergirds much cosmological writing and, as my title intimates, informs the overall conception of The Book of the Cosmos itself. Finally, this whole splendid dimension of the verbal--with its evocation of beauty, order, meaningfulness, and often ambiguity, as well as its engagement of human imagination--justifies the bookÕs aesthetic agenda. Philosopher Charles Hartshorne has written that science is "a form of love or sympathy, sympathy for the ideas of others and love of reality as open to observational inquiry. It is the imaginative, socially critical, and observational feeling for nature." I hope that readers will find much of such love, sympathy for ideas, observation, imagination, and criticism in The Book of the Cosmos, the more so for its attempt to display cosmology as an art as well as a science.

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