Nancy Ellen Abrams

Joel R. Primack

Draws on recent advances in astronomy, physics, and cosmology to present a theory of how to understand the universe and the role of our own world, in an account that offers insight into the origins and evolutionary coherence of the universe as well as its spiritual significance. 60,000 first printing.

Discovering Our Extraordinary Place in the Cosmos

The View from the Center of the Universe

Julien Nelson Hill

“famous photograph taken from the Apollo spacecraft by the first human beings to orbit the moon shows Earth as a sparkling blue-and-white ball, suspended in blackness, with a sterile lunar landscape in the foreground. This photo jolted many people into realizing in their hearts what of course they knew intellectually: that maps and globes have imprinted a false picture of reality on our minds. The photo showed no countries on our planet, only land masses, oceans, and clouds. The endless preoccupation with nations and racial or ethnic groups has completely misled our intuitions. This modern icon of our gorgeous, undivided home planet shows the power of a new image to alter perceptions and attitudes”

“Only when we’ve stepped out of our comfort zone can we reap the rewards of expanding intuition.”

“Myths don’t just represent a reality people already know about: myths present reality. They define it”

“Schooling rarely teaches us how to integrate new ideas into our thinking. Instead it lets us store them in the mental rooms where we first learned them, so that while intellectually we may juggle new cosmological ideas like erudite entertainment, our intuition reclines in an old, overstuffed, and unaffected image of reality”

“Refusing to accept the best theory we have of the universe because it might turn out wrong in the future is like never letting yourself fall in love because you want to avoid possible disappointment. There is of course danger in risking your heart, but there are greater benefits. To embrace the possibilities of this new universe is truly a leap of faith—but not the kind of faith that asks you to believe something absurd despite the evidence. This is a “leap of faith in yourself that you can believe the evidence. In the long term it may be possible to turn what is now a mostly scientific cosmology into a personal cosmology of the gut-level, water-to-a-fish kind that finally makes sense of modern life on the global scale and binds us to our tribe - humanity”

“According to modern quantum physics, only certain electron patterns are possible in atoms, and these are actually determined by geometry. The possible structures  of atoms (which underlie all of chemistry), and indeed the elementary particles out of which the atoms themselves are made, are apparently perfectly described as representations of purely mathematical possibilities. Thus at the quantum level not only does perfection exist, but there is no meaningful distinction between Form and matter. At that level, matter is geometry.”

“People often make three fundamental assumptions about time: that it is universal; that if clocks were absolutely accurate, they would all measure time passing at the same rate; and that time can be divided basically into past and future, with the past over and gone. These are useful approximations for getting along on Earth, but with regard to the universe as a whole, all three are wrong.

Weird effects described by Einstein’s relativity happen to time as soon as people or things move with respect to each other at speeds comparable to the speed of light; one of those effects is that each one observes the other one’s clock as running slow”

“What I’m really interested in,” Einstein said, “is whether God could have made the world in a different way; that is, whether the necessity of logical simplicity leaves any freedom at all.”

“There is no deeper source of meaning for human beings than to experience our own lives as reflecting the nature and origin of our universe”

“The human species is reenacting the story of “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” a poem by Goethe (later animated in the Disney movie Fantasia). The apprentice was supposed to haul water to the house while the master was gone, but by using one of his master’s incantations the apprentice cast a spell over a broomstick to haul the water for him. The apprentice was quite proud of himself, until water was flooding the house and he realized he had not learned how to break the spell. Desperately, he chopped the broomstick in two, but now each half kept  bringing water. Each chopping doubled the problem. He had unleashed an inflationary situation without understanding how to control the magic, and that is precisely where we are today”

“For us, God can’t be less or simpler, but could be more. God represents a maximum that is ever-expanding, and we are on the inside.  God represents the directions of our wonder—not the destination. The more that people discover about the universe, the faster God keeps expanding, always ahead, pulling yet teasing scientists. As God expands, God also deepens at all levels, just as our understanding of gravity deepens on the level of ordinary affairs because of Einstein’s discoveries, even though we don’t have to use relativity to calculate on that level. In this way scientific discoveries endlessly enrich the possibilities of God.”

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

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