Digital Athena
  • Blog
  • Essays and Book Reviews
  • Contact Us
  • About Digital Athena
  • Index of Essays and Reviews

Can We Be At Home in This Universe: Looking for a New Story

12/19/2012

3 Comments

 
In the latest Harper’s Magazine the physicist and novelist Alan Lightman has an essay on “Our Place in the Universe: Face to Face with the Infinite.” The problem as he sees it is that our science is discovering a larger and larger cosmos. Professional astronomers such as Garth Illingworth  at the University of California at Santa Cruz have used images from the Hubble Space Telescope to view galaxies so far away that their light has been traveling
over 13 billion years to reach us. The distance from Earth adds up to about 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles. Lightman questions whether we as human beings can actually comprehend such enormous expanses of distance and time. “Science has vastly expanded the scale of our cosmos,” he writes, “but our emotional reality is still limited by what we can touch with our bodies in the time span of our lives.” He wonders whether Illingworth and other astronomers can feel connected to this huge cosmic terrain: “Or are such things instead digitized abstractions, silent and untouchable, akin to us only in their makeup of atoms and molecules?” In other words, can we only comprehend and feel we are a part of the same reality with the cosmos when we reduce it all through physics to basic particles?

Lightman quantifies our existence within the cosmos in another way, a way that makes us seem like a random, insignificant detail in the general cosmological scheme of things: the totality of living matter on Earth—everything
from human beings to the scum floating on a pond—accounts for 0.00000001 percent of the amount of the mass of the planet, and based on the best research we have at the moment for the potential for life-sustaining environments elsewhere in the universe, that number for living matter in the universe amounts to 0.000000000000001 percent of the mass of the universe.  A very small number indeed. Beyond insignificant in fact. Yet such reductionism  doesn’t actually help our understanding of our place in the cosmos. 

It’s more relevant, Lightman implies, to look at our personal experience. The physicist both begins and ends his essay remembering an experience he once had of “infinity” when he was sailing on the Aegean Sea. He and his wife found themselves in  a place where they could look fully around themselves and see neither land nor any other boats. Just water and sky. It was then that he realized some sense of infinity: “a sensation I had not experienced before, accompanied by feelings of awe, fear, sublimity, disorientation, alienation, and disbelief.” And with that moment of insight he understood more about what it means to be human in this vast universe than all the numbers and digital images of far away galaxies could ever convey to him.  So perhaps we can only be truly at home in the universe, not by intellectualizing it or analyzing it, but just by settling right in and fully experiencing it.

3 Comments
Brian
12/20/2012 11:11:21 pm

The last sentence suggests to me that experiencing must be devoid of intellectual analysis. If this is correct, I then must question why intellectual analysis is placed outside the realm of experience. I don’t think it is. Is not Lightman’s view of the Aegean horizon an intellectual process? Information on shape, color, distance, to name a few, are gathered through the bidirectional actions of cortex and sensory organs, and subjected to all manner of sorting and examination, inclusion and exclusion, before an experience emerges from this process: “what a pretty sunset.” So I would suggest an alternative conclusion. How about we let ourselves be at home in the universe through our analysis of it?

Reply
David Reischer link
3/9/2013 01:02:09 am

We can analyze the dream but all analysis is mere abstraction. This is because the Humean empiricist is soulless in a modern society where the true randomness of our lives are papered over by the propaganda of our masters.

Reply
Nessie Hill
4/5/2018 10:56:09 am

Alan Lightman's essay is very interesting and thought-provoking to readers. Yes, we have a place in the universe. We have accept the known and the unknown within and outside our realm of scientific, religious, and other experiences. However, we must remember this fact that the human factor is timed and that the universe is timeless. Remember your nursery rhyme, Tick tick says the clock, tick tick, what you have to do, do quick" and exit our space as true, honest, worth, caring, loving, social change agent... human-beings.

Reply

Your comment will be posted after it is approved.


Leave a Reply.

    RSS Feed

    Archives

    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013
    March 2013
    February 2013
    January 2013
    December 2012
    August 2012
    July 2012
    June 2012
    May 2012
    April 2012
    March 2012
    January 2012
    December 2011
    November 2011
    October 2011
    June 2011
    May 2011
    April 2011
    March 2011
    February 2011
    December 2010
    July 2010
    June 2010
    May 2010
    March 2010
    February 2010
    January 2010
    December 2009

    Categories

    All
    AI
    Computer Models
    Convergence
    Digital Software
    Division Of Labor
    E Readers
    Facebook
    Financial Markets
    Google
    Innovation Business Cycle
    Internet
    Knowledge
    Learning
    Media Use
    Myths
    Powerpoint
    Robots
    Screen Life
    Screen Life
    Search
    Social Networking
    Targeted Marketing
    Technology And Jobs
    The Nature Of The Digital
    The Nature Of The Digital
    Video Games
    Web 2.0
    Wikis
    Youth

    Cynthia's Blog Plan

    I'll aim to post here a few times a month, based on current events and my ongoing research.