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  Published 2018 by Prometheus Books

  Your Place in the Universe: Understanding Our Big, Messy Existence. Copyright © 2018 by Paul M. Sutter. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the internet or a website without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Sutter, Paul M., 1982- author.

  Title: Your place in the universe : understanding our big, messy existence / by Paul M. Sutter.

  Description: Amherst, New York : Prometheus Books, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018023961 (print) | LCCN 2018033313 (ebook) |

  ISBN 9781633884731 (ebook) | ISBN 9781633884724 (hardcover)

  Subjects: LCSH: Cosmology—Popular works. | Astronomy—Popular works.

  Classification: LCC QB982 (ebook) | LCC QB982 .S88 2018 (print) | DDC 523.1—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018023961

  Printed in the United States of America

  Prologue: Perhaps This Was All a Big Misunderstanding

  Chapter 1. Sacred Geometry

  Chapter 2. A Broken Universe

  Chapter 3. Tales from a Bewildering Sky

  Chapter 4. The Death of Antimatter

  Chapter 5. Beyond the Horizon

  Chapter 6. Bathed in Radiance

  Chapter 7. Reaping the Quantum Whirlwind

  Interlude: A Guide to Living in an Expanding Universe

  Chapter 8. Behold the Cosmic Dawn

  Chapter 9. Of Matters Dark and Cold

  Chapter 10. The Cosmic Web

  Chapter 11. The Rise of Dark Energy

  Chapter 12. The Stelliferous Era

  Chapter 13. The Fall of Light

  Chapter 14. The Long Winter

  Epilogue: A Game of Chance

  Notes

  Select Bibliography and Further Reading

  Index

  How the heck do you write a book about the whole entire universe? And not just all the gory physics on scales small and great, but how our knowledge of the cosmos has changed in the past few hundred years, and how that's influenced our views of the heavens, the Earth, and ourselves? And how we got to know what we know now, through all the twists and turns and dead ends and blind alleys and just-kiddings of scientific research?

  I honestly have no idea, so I suppose we're about to find out together.

  If you're already familiar with at least some aspects of the cosmic tapestry that I'm about to unfurl (unfold? I'm unsure here of fabric storage techniques), then I sincerely hope you appreciate the slightly warped perspective I have on the history of cosmology and the history of the universe. When it comes to the past four hundred years, and the past 13.8 billion years, certain stories, certain people, and certain physics have always captured my attention more than others, and naturally I wrote about those and pretended the uninteresting stuff doesn't matter.

  If you're completely new to matters cosmological, well, then you're in for a real treat. You're going to encounter some interesting (to put it mildly) characters, crazy physical processes, and, of course, seriously intensive and possibly therapeutic discussions on deeply enigmatic mysteries of the cosmos. I promise I'm doing my best to hit the right level between blow-your-mind and hold-your-hand. But I don't know your background, your interests, or when you dropped out of school, so don't worry if a section or two (or heck, the entire book) gets a little confusing. Go ahead and give it another shot—I won't mind.

  Of course I need to toss in an obligatory thanks to a good fraction of the human race. From the dedicated scientists (or protoscientists, in some cases), both named and unnamed, who actually figured out all this stuff, to all the people who have supported me, guided me, taught me, told me I was wrong (that happened a lot), and generally helped make me, me and this book, this book. You know who you are—and thank you for buying this book out of a sense of obligation—so you'll understand why I won't bother listing all your names. My publisher set a word limit, after all.

  I'm sure that in some way I owe you a deep and sincere apology after you read this book. If you're a fan of history, then my choices to ignore/simplify/disregard certain aspects of the complicated and intertwined nature of human lives and pursuits might irritate you. If you're a fan of physics, then my choices to ignore/simplify/disregard certain aspects of the complicated and intertwined nature of natural processes might irritate you. If you're a fan of formal writing and good grammar, then you probably haven't even made it this far.

  Depending on your own personal belief and/or philosophical system, there's a really solid chance at some point you will read something that will deeply, terribly offend you, causing you to hurl the book at the nearest wall. It's cool, we all do it. I just hope you know that it's not my intention to offend you—either with my style or my substance—but to play a game of show-and-tell with the universe. This is the story of the cosmos as revealed by the tools of scientific inquiry, which have so far proven to be pretty awesome in that regard. I personally find the heavens above us deeply profound, awe-inspiring, and worthy of further study, and I hope the humble paragraphs you're about to encounter (a) do the universe justice and (b) spark a similar passion in you.

  But besides being a story of how we look at the universe, this book is also a tale of how the universe looks back at us—about our relationship with the night sky and how we (mostly mistakenly) think it intersects with our daily lives. Some of you (not necessarily you, but somebody) might take that as a critique on a particular religious or philosophical or other nonscientific belief. OK, fine. That's not the point of the book; but I'm not your boss and I'm not going to tell you what to do.

  Is this book important? Is it necessary? Is cosmology—the study of our entire universe—vital to the advance of human civilization? Well, are you important and necessary and vital? In the grand sense of things, probably not. But we still keep you around and take you out to dinner, don't we? The game of science isn't to make the world a better place—although some scientists are, thankfully, engaged in exactly that—it's to make a better understanding of the world. Science itself is a method, a tool, for studying nature. That tool can be applied in many cases, from what's causing your migraine (besides chapter 4) to the origins, history, and contents of the universe.

  Trying to figure out how nature works, even in literally unreachable parts of our cosmos, is an end in itself. That's exactly the point: to learn more, because being curious and learning stuff is kind of fun, if learning stuff is your kind of fun. And it's my kind of fun, so that's why this book exists. I have loved learning all these facets of cosmological matters through my youth and professional career. Beyond that, I owe it to you. It's you—the taxpayer, the friend, the supporter—who makes science happen. It's you who keep the lights on and the streets clean and the accounts in order and the beans sprouting, enabling a
small percentage of the population to follow a particularly odd passion for wrestling with nature on a daily basis.

  This book is yours—in a certain sense, you own the collective knowledge summarized in these pages. You also literally own this book, unless you stole it, in which case shame on you.

  The most important thing to remember, above all else, no matter your level of familiarity, your personal beliefs, the ease with which you get offended, or any other trait that might affect your perception of this work, is to purchase many copies of this book to distribute to your friends, family, coworkers, acquaintances, mail carriers, local fire department, students, teachers, priests/rabbis/imams, pets, strangers, landscape architects, interior designers, representatives of the local AFL-CIO chapter, and government leaders, and of course a backup copy for yourself.

  Science is for sharing, people.

  So let's get moving.

  Of course the Earth is at the center of the universe. Just look at the evidence. The sun, moon, stars, and planets all wheel around us in the great celestial dance; how are we possibly to make sense of that if we're not at the focal point? And have you seen the Earth? It's large and solid and made of rock—are you seriously suggesting it moves?

  Look up in the sky. Birds. Clouds. The wind. All moving effortlessly, right? They are well removed from this immobile rock on which we stand, so it stands to reason that movement comes even more naturally to the stars and planets, even further removed from us.

  Besides, things up there are just so different. Our lives here on Earth are dirty, chaotic, even sinful. But the graceful movements of the heavenly realm are something else. Motions so precise we can use them to set our calendars. Unfailing, the same stars appear on the horizon at the precise time they did last year, and the year before, and so on into the unwritten time of our ancestors.

  Surely the laws of nature that we understand here on Earth don't apply up there. They have their own rules, their own sets of laws that govern their behavior. The heavens surround us but are separate from us.

  Oh, what about those comets and meteors? Surely they're just strange atmospheric phenomena. Don't worry too much about those.

  Can we really blame our forebears for thinking we are at the center? Up until a few hundred years ago, it was the simplest and most natural explanation of the available data. Not only that, it was supported by rational, coherent arguments. Our ancestors, as we do, used multiple paths to understand the world around them—evidence-based, faith-based, reason-based, math-based—all of which pointed in the same direction: out.

  Our ancestors were no dummies. They were just as smart as we are today and perfectly capable of understanding the world around them. And astronomy was vitally important to their daily lives: when to plant crops, when to reap the harvest, when to start preparing for campaigns, when to celebrate holidays. Humans have been using calendars for millennia (at least!), and the natural, regular, repeatable, predictable movements of the heavens provided the perfect device.

  I suppose I should mention that ancient peoples thought that the stars influenced our daily lives too—not just by proxy through the effects of the seasons, but literally determined our fate. It's a unique perspective that's missing from modern scientific perspectives (with good reason, and I'll get to that in a bit). But again, I have to stress that your extremely-great-grandparents regarded their horoscope with as much seriousness as they could muster.

  The motions of the stars and planets were connected to the seasons. So even though the celestial realm obeys its own set of laws, it must surely be connected—somehow—to events here on Earth. And despite the messiness and chaotic nature of our home, there's a sense of some sort of hidden order and regularity behind our lives. There are obvious patterns in nature, so perhaps there are unobvious patterns as well, patterns that can only be teased out by careful observation and interpretation.

  Thus, the astrologer: someone who carefully studied the great wheel of heavenly motions and inferred their implications for the Earthbound. Born during a particular month? That must be linked to your personality. Solar eclipse during your reign as emperor? Yikes, better clean up your act. Comet appears as you prepare for battle? The gods disfavor your enemy, and the time is right for attack.

  One of our earliest records of the profession of astrologer (or, if you prefer, astronomer; the two terms weren't cleanly separated until relatively recently) comes to us from ancient China, right as they were at the edge of developing a writing system. The story goes that the two court astrologers of the emperor Chung K'ang failed to predict a solar eclipse in 2137 BCE. They were immediately beheaded.1

  Yes, our ancestors took this sky-watching stuff seriously.

  So it's no surprise that as the centuries progressed, more data from observations accumulated, and astronomers were able to make ever-more-sophisticated models of those motions so they could make better astrological predictions. What better way to accurately tell your fortunes, an entrepreneurial young astrologer might say to a prospective royal client, than with the most precise measurements and predictions available?

  And the Ptolemaic system, developed by Ptolemy (hence the name) in the second century CE and fully established as everyone's favorite cosmological model by the sixteenth century in Europe, provided the most detailed astrological calculations possible. This model of the universe put the Earth at the center (of course!), with each celestial body assigned to its own crystal sphere. These spheres nested within each other like a set of heavenly matryoshka dolls, gliding effortlessly against each other in their cosmic dance.

  The moon's sphere came first, followed by one carrying the sun and one for each of the planets (except Uranus and Neptune, which were too dim to be known), with the outermost layer carrying the sphere of stars. Beyond that was probably heaven itself, or something like it.

  It's a little difficult for our modern minds to wrap themselves around prescientific cosmologies. Individual statements or expressions sound perfectly normal in isolation. Even today you could hear someone talking about, say, the time of the next lunar eclipse, or someone lecturing about the nature of the divine. But today these kinds of statements tend to be widely separated. Nobody (who wants to be taken seriously) claims that the pattern of lunar eclipses gives us a window into Holy Wisdom and a clue about what we ought to have for dinner this week.

  It's not that modern scientists are incapable of religious thought, but they usually don't think about both subjects at the same time, and it's rare for a scientific treatise to use religious texts to bolster its argument (and vice versa).

  This compartmentalization of inquiry into the world around us is a relatively recent invention. For almost all of human history, people who were curious about the universe were simply that: curious about the universe. And one could inquire about the universe in many different ways: using evidence, using divine revelation, using rational arguments, using mathematical proofs, and so on.

  So the highly sophisticated cosmological Ptolemaic model wasn't just a physical model of the order of the universe—it was fully incorporated into the religious, philosophical, and mathematical views of the time and place.2

  I'm highlighting this blending of modes of inquiry into the natural world because I think there's something missing from the usual story of the birth of the scientific revolution. That story, put very simply, goes like this: we used to think the Earth was at the center of the universe, but that model was flawed. Copernicus proposed that the sun was at the center, Kepler refined this theory, and Galileo got in a big argument with the Catholic Church about it. Lots of fighting and a good amount of burning at the stake ensued, but eventually science prevailed, and now we know better.

  I don't think that gives the right flavor of what went down at the turn of the 1600s. Don't get me wrong: Galileo fought with the church (a lot), people got burned (a lot), and a sun-centered model was adopted (eventually). But the impression that I, at least, got as I was taught this way back in grade school was that the
arrogant know-it-alls thought the Earth was at the center, taking pride of place, and refused to accept the new view.

  To be fair, most people of historic eras simply didn't think about this at all. They were too busy dying of plague, dying from starvation, or dying in battle to wonder about the precise mathematical formula that would unlock the inner workings of the celestial spheres. The arguments that have passed down to us are from the intelligentsia of the age: those who could read and write (usually in Latin), who had access to the books written by their intellectual ancestors, who had enough time to make precise measurements of the objects in the sky, and who had the ear of a king or pope or other wealthy dude to fund their studies.

  So I can't tell you what Mathias or Marta Everyman thought about the universe, but I can tell you what Nicolaus Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, and Galileo Galilei thought.

  By the late 1500s, folks pretty much knew there were some issues with the Ptolemaic model of cosmology. The trouble, as is usually the trouble when theories begin to crumble, was data. Assuming that the planets move in perfect circles doesn't quite fit the observations. Sometimes the planets appear to move backward in their orbits, which just shouldn't happen.

  The easiest solution is to add a so-called epicycle, a circle-within-a-circle to account for the extra motion. OK, fair enough. Circles are nice and elegant, and a series of nested circles within each orbit is only one step away from a series of nested spheres to explain the orbits themselves. There's a certain appealing symmetry there.

  But in the centuries leading up to 1600, astronomers started making more accurate observations, and they noted deviations from the circles-within-circles approach. To explain this, they added ever more epicycles, each one tacked onto a particular planet to match all the observations.

  It was a bit complicated, but it worked: it fit the data and was able to make predictions. You could tell your fortunes with the epicycle Earth-centered system. Maybe it was a bit cumbersome, so naturally you would need a few years of training before you could become an adept astrologer. But there's nothing wrong with baking a little job security into the system, right?