John Rennie, editor in chief, Scientific American
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Gravity's Engines
We’ve long understood black holes to be the points at which the universe as we know it comes to an end. Often billions of times more massive than the Sun, they...
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“You are not special,” the character Tyler Durden warns his followers in the movie Fight Club and in the namesake novel by Chuck Palahniuk. “You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You’re the same decaying organic matter as everything else.” Durden’s harsh but not inaccurate assessment lays the foundation for that story’s subsequent tumult. The same idea under the name the “Copernican principle” also happens to have been a linchpin of science for the past four centuries. (The first rule of the Copernican principle is, Do not talk about the Copernican principle, but....)
In 1543 Copernicus gave the establishment of his day a bloody nose by proposing that the best explanation for the observed motions of the stars and planets was to picture the sun, not Earth, as the center of known space. He had the prudent good sense to promptly die. Sixty years later the Vatican kayoed two astronomers who forced the point more aggressively: it burned Giordano Bruno at the stake and caged Galileo until he threw in the towel (while angling for a rematch with a mumbled “Eppur si muove”). Nevertheless, the facts were on the scientists’ side. Astronomers now develop their theories mindful that Earth most likely occupies an ordinary, unprivileged place in the cosmos.
So 11 years ago, when astronomers suddenly realized that the universe was not merely expanding but accelerating in its expansion, most of them concluded that some otherwise undetectable antigravity force,a “dark energy,” was shoving apart galaxies. An alternative possibility, however, can explain the observations as a fluke of cosmological geometry. It avoids invoking dark energy as an ad hoc cause but at the price of throwing out the Copernican principle: roughly speaking, it puts Earth, or at least our galaxy, back at the center of the observable universe. Timothy Clifton and Pedro G. Ferreira explore that idea in “Does Dark Energy Really Exist?”
Even if the Copernican principle’s application to cosmology is subject to amendment, its application to other areas of science, notably biology, remains robustly well supported. (The second rule of the Copernican principle is, Do not talk about the Copernican principle...) It can nonetheless offend humans’ self-importance: witness creationists’ ongoing push-back against the evolutionary concept that people are simply another type of animal.
And yet biological evidence of our kinship with other creatures is everywhere we look. Gerald H. Jacobs and Jeremy Nathans reveal the literal truth of that statement in “The Evolution of Primate Color Vision”. Humans, apes and monkeys see a range of colors that other mammals do not; more tellingly, the genetic and biomolecular details of how humans and Old World primates (to whom we are most closely related) see color are different even from those of their New World cousins.
Our relatedness to other animals also leaves us with some common vulnerabilities. When an evolving viral disease hops a species barrier, it can sometimes cause horrific infections. Virologist Nathan Wolfe proposes in “Preventing the Next Pandemic” that health authorities monitor the status of animal diseases on the verge of leaping to humans. That fight is one we do not want to lose.
Editor's Note: This story was originally published with the title "Nothing Special"
This article was originally published with the title Nothing Special.
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13 Comments
Add CommentUh oh. The christians aren't going to be happy about this.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhy not? Christians always have believed that Earth was special, though it is obviously not the "center" of the Solar System. The comments about our "evolution" are nothing but canards--distractions. Scientific evidence supports creation, not evolutionism. Natural selection (sometimes called micro-evolution) is in evidence and supports the Bible. There is absolutely no evidence to support "macro-evolution" (aka, from-goo-to-you-by-way-of-the-zoo evolution).
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo what, humans are just another animal. We're nothing special. We aren't as good as all those other animals that have built cities, constructed spaceships, grow food year round, cure diseases, help those of others species, and recognize that they've made spelling and grammatical errors in their posts. Yeah, humans are nothing special.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOh, and I forgot all those extraterrestrials that have visited us to remind us how not special we are.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisReal Christians have, of course, accepted the reality of biological evolution for a very long time, despite the ravings of Creationist liars.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBut you do the cause of science no good by telling lies and half-truths of your own. Galileo was not condemned for teaching heliocentrism, but for claiming that heliocentrism was obvious and absolute truth that only a fool could doubt, even though Copernicus version had nearly as much ad-hoc kludgery as Ptolemys system. For a century, the church had not complained about Copernicus at all. After the Galileo affair, Copernicus book was censored in a mere nine sentences, also seen as teaching heliocentric absolutism. In the next revision of the Index , even these corrections were removed. Kepler and Newton had made Copernicus point.
(As for the recent re-opening of Galileoa case, the issue at hand was not Copernicanism, but whether Galileo was still guilty of being a smart-ass. Frankly, on that point, he arguably was; his behavior throughout the affair was childish.)
As for Bruno, his condemnation had nothing to do with science of any kind, which was not even brought up. He was convicted of plain old-fashioned doctrinal heresy, of which he was plainly guilty. (I am not attempting to argue that the church was right to burn him--only that by listing him as a martyr for science you are retailing comic-book history.)
It should also be noted that most of Brunos astronomical thinking was based on what is called by some people (but not by educated believers) mysticism . Read what he actually wrote, instead of a few, selected correct hits he made (so, after all, did Velikovsky), and youll laugh yourself out of your seat at his nonsense.
I made the mistake above of assuming that you had a website supporting modern technology. Please assume the presence of all the apostrophes and quotation marks that were discarded.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Real Christian"?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhy would a "real Christian" not accept what God plainly says in the Scriptures.
I don't think "real Christian" is an accurate characterization. Although, I'm not sure what term should be used in regard to disregarding what God says in his word.
Bible believing is the term that is often used for those that believe what God says in the Scriptures.
A person that believes that God created everything, as he in the Scriptures said he did, is not a "liar". I'm not sure why he would be considered a liar. You may disagree with him, in that you instead believe that non-life to life evolution is the explanation for what exists. That doesn't though make the Bible believing Christian a liar.
==>"Real Christian"?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this==>Why would a "real Christian" not accept what God plainly says in the Scriptures.
Because the evidence is plain that Creationism is a lie, and real Christians don't tell lies.
==>I don't think "real Christian" is an accurate characterization. Although, I'm not sure what term should be used in regard to disregarding what God says in his word.
Because the Bible is /not/ the "word of God" in the way that you mean it, as witness 1 Corinthians 7:12. The Bible is the work of men. Inspired men. Holy men. But still only men, and men who wrote as they thought, and not as God dictated verbatim, as though the prophets and apostles were only His secretaries.
Because to believe that the Bible is a magic book of answers is flat heathenism and idolatry. If you treat it that way, the Bible itself becomes only one more trap for Satan to snare your soul with.
There are no magic answers; God wants grown-ups. Hebrews 5:12-14.
I regret the editor parroting certain popular myths. Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake, not because he defended heliocentrism, but because he preached ideas (like pantheism) that ran opposite everything the Catholoic Church stood/stands for. And the Galileo trial is a little less black and white so many of us would like it to be. Galileo and pope Urbanus VIII were at one time (close) friends, but Galileo thought if fit to identify the pope in one of his famous books with Simplicio. In other words, he called his friend a simpleton. Now, wouldn't you be upset if your friend called you an idiot? And finally, Galileo never mumbled those words "Eppur si muove". Keep the drama were it belongs, on the Broadway stage. I do not mean to defend the pope, catholicism or christianity, let alone creationism (heaven forbid, if you pardon the irony), but please, bias can work two ways, you know.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI now notice that John W. Kennedy beat me to it. My apologies for not reading your remarks before posting my comment. It would have saved me the trouble :-)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn my opinion, we are nothing special. Yes we can build cities, spaceships, etc., but what good has any of that done for us. If you take a closer look at humans, it would seem that instead of being another animal we are more similar to a virus. We attach to our host and use all of the natural resources up and damage it so severely that it ends up being inhabital. Also, as harsh as this may sound, if there is another planet similar to Earth in space, then I hope that we never find it. No I am not against humanity, but I am against all the ignorant people that live within in our population.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt�s really quite idiotic to try to preserve some hint of respectfulness to the religious pretense that Bruno wasn�t burned because he defied medieval zeitgeist. It takes only a proper philosophical education to understand that what was at stake there were not such pathetic issues as to know if the Devil would or not to be saved, but the menace to the whole building of medieval knowledge and institutions. And the Inquisitors knew it very well _ better than their spiritual sucessors, as we can see in this commentary box.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou write: "So 11 years ago, when astronomers suddenly realized that the universe was not merely expanding but accelerating in its expansion, [...]". It is not true. Astronomers couldn't do it since they only observe the redshift in light coming from galaxies and they interpret the redshift as caused by recession of galaxies. Yet if the redshift is caused by a different mechanism and not the recession of galaxies then the accelerating expanson of universe is only an illusion. In 1984 I proved that it folows from Einstein's gravitation that it is the case. The machanism is "general time dilation" following directly from the conservation of energy in Einstein's physics (however astronomers for some reason use "physics" with creation of energy from nothing, possibly as better fitting their hypothesis of "big bang"). But the parameters of the observed apparent accelerating expansion are as prdicted by Einstein's general realativity. So the universe is not expnanding for sure if Einstein's gravitation is valid and there are not yet any false prediction of this theory so we should rather believe that we live in Einstein's (stationary) universe. My paper on this subject passed the review process but editors (of Phys. Rev. Lett.) decided not to print it as being of too little interest to their readers who all believe in the big bang hypothesis. So those editors know that the universe is not expanding but apparentoy you don't and so you are misinforming your readers. But you don't have to since the other option is to believe in EInstein's gravitation.
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