Name: Human Universe
Rating: 4.2 (5 reviews)
ISBN: 9780008129798

Andrew Cohen

Professor Brian Cox

Top ten Sunday Times Bestseller ‘Engaging, ambitious and creative’ Guardian Where are we? Are we alone? Who are we? Why are we here? What is our future?

Human Universe

Brian Cox

Human life is a staggeringly strange thing. On the surface of a ball of rock falling around a nuclear fireball in the blackness of a vacuum the laws of nature conspired to create a naked ape that can look up at the stars and wonder where it came from. What is a human being? Objectively, nothing of consequence. Particles of dust in an infinite arena, present for an instant in eternity. Clumps of atoms in a universe with more galaxies than people. And yet a human being is necessary for the question itself to exist, and the presence of a question in the universe -- any question -- is the most wonderful thing. Questions require minds, and minds bring meaning. What is meaning? I don't know, except that the universe and every pointless speck inside it means something to me. I am astonished by the existence of a single atom, and find my civilisation to be an outrageous imprint on reality. I don't understand it. Nobody does, but it makes me smile. This book asks questions about our origins, our destiny, and our place in the universe. We have no right to expect answers; we have no right to even ask. But ask and wonder we do. Human Universe is first and foremost a love letter to humanity; a celebration of our outrageous fortune in existing at all. I have chosen to write my letter in the language of science, because there is no better demonstration of our magnificent ascent from dust to paragon of animals than the exponentiation of knowledge generated by science. Two million years ago we were apemen. Now we are spacemen. That has happened, as far as we know, nowhere else. That is worth celebrating.

Tim Pendry

If you are not deterred by very occasional moments of trite humanist polemic, special pleading for investment in hard science and a slight tendency to pander to an American readership, this is an absolutely brilliant introduction to current scientific cosmological thought. It deals with big questions in an adult, uncompromising but clear way. Cox and Cohen have managed to offer us some seriously hard science (well above my comprehension) as jewels in a setting of explanation that mean we actually can understand what we need to understand. Cox and Cohen do not over-claim for science. They claim for it only what it can do - give us the best framework 'to hand' for understanding what the world is really like out there and what makes us what we are or at least appear to be. This highly probabilistic approach based on rational questioning of available hard evidence and using mathematics as a predictive tool is now giving us a vastly speeded up re-evaluation of our place in the universe to those prepared to listen to what is being said. The book helps us ordinary Joes catch up with hard science and strip away some of the layers of presumption about our place in the universe. It avoids the tiresome tendency of many science writers to try to explain through speculation in order to force awe on us. Awe and wonder do not need such rhetorical trickery - the facts now contain enough to make us wonder at the situation in which we find ourselves as accidental emergent consciousnesses in a corner of an incalculably vast multiverse who may or may not be alone in it. Cox and Cohen look at five basic questions - where are we? are we alone? who are we? why are we here (not meaning why some man in a beard decided to put us here but what are the conditions that enabled our existence) and, the weakest section, what is our future? Apart from their too pat dismissal (contradicted by some of the data in the rest of the book) of the likelihood of our aloneness as emergent consciousness, there is nothing to argue with in their general conclusions - they have science at its best on their side. The last section, however, should have been a better and more thoughtful disquisition on existential risk around which there is considerable contemporary hysteria. One gets the impression that the expansion of the TV format fell apart here because Cox wanted to lobby for investment in the asteroid impact space programme. This is where the bulk of the irritating posturing noted in the first paragraph appears. There is much to say on existential risk. I share the authors' puzzlement at our political classes' hitherto slow response to the asteroid issue, far more humanly serious than the threat claimed by the less secure science of climate change. The authors present almost everything they offer us in an uncompromisingly scientifically-based way. They lapse rarely, for example by simply asserting in a few sentences the 'threat of climate change' - either they know and can explain or they cannot. Still, this is not the bulk of the book. 95% and certainly the sections on the first four questions contain some of the best science writing currently available. It is highly recommended for that reason. Nor should you be put off by the mathematical formulae. They are there for the clever ones with that sort of mind. The authors do not patronise us with noddy-and-big-ears versions of science but they do not try to take for granted the meaning of the formulae either. They give brief explanations and then embed the complexity in a narrative that tells us what the science actually means and challenges us to challenge it. But the hidden sub-text of the work is not just scientific but cultural. In a world in which the vast bulk of the population have no inkling of what the universe is really like or our place in it and in which a democracy of the ignorant is lauded as the right and proper means of conducting ourselves, what this book contains is dynamite. It shows us that we are both significant and insignificant in different ways. We are significant to ourselves as the only or one of the few emergent consciousnesses capable of understanding its own situation across vast tracts of space and time. We are insignificant because we are highly vulnerable to the workings of a universe of unpredictable moving parts that does not appreciate our planet-bound biology very much and whose scale is far beyond our imagining except in awesome mathematical and theoretical terms. Even the 'Big Bang' (last refuge of the theistic scoundrel) is not merely under assault. Cosmology now makes it a blip amongst uncountable infinite blips. The conditions for life or not come into existence in a complex multiverse in which all things are possible. A personal God will never go away for those whose minds are stuck on such matters but the last vestiges of a cosmological God are hurtling behind yet further barriers of multiversal infinity. Our insignificance in relation to such a 'system' is truly awe-inspiring. The authors imply that the only option left (other than the cosmic existentialism that is always an individual's fall-back position) is a scientific humanism in which we become the measure of our own significance just because we are, in universal terms, insignificant.

Nelson Álvarez 

Professor Brian Cox takes readers out of this world and into a whole new dimension as he gives us a new perspective on human life. Following the spark of human curiosity from its ignition in the distant past to its journey into the future, the book spans the history of the universe, as Brian attempts to understand the greatest wonder of them all - humankind.

Human Universe

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