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

Overview

In this strikingly original book, a world-renowned cosmologist and an innovative writer of the history and philosophy of science uncover an astonishing truth: Humans actually are central to the universe. What does this mean for our culture and our personal lives? The answer is revolutionary: a science-based cosmology that allows us to understand the universe as a whole and our extraordinary place in it.

Editorial Reviews

If greeting card poet Susan Polis Schultz wrote about physics and the universe, this is the book she would produce. Filled with simplistic observations ("In their hearts most people are still living in an imagined universe where... we humans have no special place and often feel insignificant") as well as romantic cheerleading ("We need to overflow with gratitude that our universe... is filled with light and possibilities"), it offers cosmology disguised as a self-help guide to the universe. The authors--Primack is a physicist at UC-Santa Cruz, and Abrams is a philosopher of science--contend that Newton's picture of the universe as shapeless and endless left humans feeling cosmically homeless, but in response they articulate a Peter Pan physics in which humans are intimately related to the universe because we are made of stardust, i.e., we're an integral part of the cosmos. Our place in the universe is extraordinary, they claim, because the universe will never be in this moment of time again, and we have a responsibility to take care of the Earth since there is still time to solve some of our cosmic problems. Attempting to weave science and spirituality into one cosmic fabric, the authors satisfy the reader in neither realm. B&w illus. (Apr.)
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Author Information

Bio of Joel R. Primack

Joel R. Primack and Nancy Ellen Abrams are married and have unusually complementary viewpoints. Joel R. Primack is one of the world's leading cosmologists and helped create the foundational theory of the evolution of the universe. Nancy Ellen Abrams is a writer and lawyer with a background in the history, philosophy, and politics of science, who has worked on science and technology policy. She has also for over two decades closely followed Joel's research, attended countless astrophysics conferences, and talked to almost everyone in the field. Together they have developed and taught a prize-winning course at the University of California, Santa Cruz, called Cosmology and Culture. Joel R. Primack, Professor of Physics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, specializes in the formation and evolution of galaxies and the nature of the dark matter that makes up most of the matter in the universe. Primack received his A.B. from Princeton in 1966 and his Ph.D. from Stanford in 1970. He was then a Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows of Harvard University. After helping to create what is now called the "Standard Model" of particle physics, Primack began working in cosmology in the late 1970s and he became a leader in the new field of particle astrophysics. He is one of the principal originators and developers of the theory of Cold Dark Matter, which has become the basis for the standard modern picture of structure formation in the universe. With support from the National Science Foundation, NASA, and the Department of Energy, he uses supercomputers to simulate and visualize the evolution of the universe under various assumptions, and compare the predictions of these theories to the latest observational data. Primack was made a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) in 1988 "for pioneering contributions to gauge theory and cosmology." He served on the Executive Committee of the APS Division of Astrophysics 2001-2002. He has won awards for his research from the A. P. Sloan Foundation and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

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Additional Info

Imprint

Penguin

Filesize

1.99 MB

Number of Pages

400

eBook ISBN

9781101123966