The View from the Center of the Universe: Discovering Our Extraordinary Place in the Cosmos | 
 enlarge | Authors: Joel R. Primack, Nancy Ellen Abrams
Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover
Category: Book
List Price: $26.95
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Rating:  40 reviews
Sales Rank: 70896
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Media: Hardcover
Pages: 400
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.4
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6 x 1.4
Dewey Decimal Number: 523.1
Publication Date: April 6, 2006
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Product Description
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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 35 more reviews...
 An excellent, much needed book, but with a proviso April 12, 2006
MARTIN HELLMAN (California, USA)
132 out of 140 found this review helpful
When I first came to these reviews, the only one was entitled "Physics Fluff", gave the book one star, and panned it based on "I flipped through this book at a bookstore and then read the Publisher's Weekly review." Having just heard Primack and Abrams speak on the book at a Stanford Physics Department Colloquium and been very impressed, I worried that people might miss the important messages they convey because of such negative comments based on a cursory review of the materials. While I am only a few chapters into the book and would normally wait to write a review (though I did hear the authors' 90 minute talk which summarizes their work), I feel it necessary to immediately counter an impression based on an even less thorough reading.
Primack has dared to explore territory where few scientists venture. (Abrams is an attorney, writer and poet, so we scientists expect her to be a bit strange - and probably wrong.) Primack and Abrams have written a book that weaves a tale of science, myth, and ethics. Mixing soft subjects with the hard sciences goes against religious doctrine - scientific religious doctrine, that is. And, as with most religions, this dogmatic approach is usually invisible to its adherents. Even though the authors are careful to distinguish the hard science from the softer areas, this is a dangerous mixture to introduce into a scientific culture.
For example, at the Physics Department Colloquium I attended, this problem was manifested during the Q&A period following the talk. People asked only about neutrinos, cosmic expansion, how we can see objects 40 billion light years away when the Universe is only 15 billion years old, etc. Primack the physicist answered all these questions expertly, while Abrams the poet stood largely mute and ignored although she had had equal time during the talk and had hit on a number of critical points - but all on the "soft" side. I racked my brain trying to come up with a question that would draw attention to the truths she had voiced and that would be appropriate in this temple of science, but could not. Instead, when I was recognized, I stated that conundrum and lamented the fact that we limit ourselves in this manner. That at least brought some recognition to Abrams' contribution and the problem we face.
In this book, there is something much deeper underlying all the wonderful cosmological physics that is beautifully explained. We live at a critical time and the fate of the earth hangs in the balance as our technological progress far outstrips our social and moral development. While to my mind, this is a scientifically established fact (e.g., see http://www-ee.stanford.edu/~hellman/breakthrough.html), other scientists will disagree.
This is not the place to argue whether or not the larger worldview espoused by Primack and Abrams, and to which I subscribe, is correct. Rather, I encourage you to read their excellent book, with one proviso. If it makes you mad to see science discussed outside of a narrow box of numbers and equations, as I suspect was the case for the reviewer mentioned above, do not read this book. There is enough anger in the world already.
But if you truly believe there is one Universe as opposed to art and science each inhabiting separate worlds (even though it is extremely difficult for our intellects to see their connection), then I heartily recommend this book. If you are scientifically trained, you may still, as I did, occasionally get a queasy feeling and want to cry out "Hey wait! How can they say that?" But, if you keep an open mind, more often than not, the second part of that interjection will be answered in a way that opens new vistas. Even in the few chapters I have read thus far, I have been well rewarded with new ideas and viewpoints.
P.S. While the audience at the Colloquium asked only hard science questions and largely ignored Abrams during the Q&A, the large stack of books that the Stanford Bookstore had on sale afterward sold very well. Also, many people came up and asked her questions after the formal Q&A was completed. So there is more hope than that story might first indicate.
P.P.S. I have since finished the book and stand by my earlier review, above. No changes were needed. The only thing I would add is that I learned some very interesting physics from the book. For example, it presents a very simple and understandable explanation for why physicists now believe that the majority of matter in the universe is "dark matter."
A quick take April 12, 2006
Jerome M (Baltimore, MD USA)
24 out of 29 found this review helpful
I am writing this as a first impression and to counter the poor review. I have just purchased the book and have had time for a quick overview. I think the poor review is unfair to this book.
The authors central insight is how we as humans need to use metaphor to understand concepts and events that are not on our scale. He has a very good overview of what we know of cosmic and quantum theory and how they are related. It is very up-to-date on our current understanding of such things as inflationary universe and string theory. It's comparable to most other current books out there on the topic. It IS very philosophical but not religious. It uses religious metaphor so it is easy to think its some mush book trying to meld current religion with science. It makes quite clear that the religious metaphor is metaphor that we are applying to something we don't understand. It gives insight into why we use metaphor in the way we do and how to properly understand it. (we misattribute things that happen on our scale to a larger scale. Such as attributing thought, which happens on the scale of our neural connections with something larger such as weather patterns.) But also goes on to provide deeper insight as to how our metaphors are true. It shows how our wonderful and unimaginably huge the creative process is in the inflationary universe but also how we are wrong to attribute "father in the sky" attributes to it. This is not a mushy spiritual book but I think quite the opposite. Its not trying to scientifically prove god and such but just the opposite trying to showing how we are wrong to apply our scale concepts to the universe and that what is true is much bigger than we imagine.
I will update this as soon as i finish the book.
PS. I have finished the book and stand by what i stated above.
An eye-opener December 28, 2007
Andrew Hollo (Melbourne, Australia)
8 out of 8 found this review helpful
When I was in my early teens, I had sleepless nights because of a TV documentary about the millions of "invisible" organisms which live in our hair, on our skin, and within our bodies, quite unbeknown to us. I lay awake not because I was frightened, but excited. Magnified tremendously, this broadcast showed them crawling around like dinosaurs, complete with scaly flanks and barbed tentacles. Like most boys of my generation, I was fascinated by the prospect of discovering alien life, yet here was something equally intriguing - and it was real! And right under my nose. Well, under my fingernails when I scratched myself.
What if those organisms, in turn, had similar parasites? And what if they, in turn, did? Scaled in the other direction, what if we humans were blind to the fact that we existed on some giant creature's epidermis? Which, in turn . . . well, you get the picture. These ideas lurked and never really congealed into something solid until, yesterday, I read Primack and Abram's masterful book. "The View from the Center of the Universe" attempts nothing less than a plain English explanation of our place in the cosmos, fusing Primack's `hard science' astronomy with Abram's metaphorising to create a compelling Turquoise cosmology: something that builds upon purple's creation myths, red's desire for centrality, blue's insistence on truth, orange's quantification & testability and green's yearning for wholeness.
What impressed me most about this book were the way the authors addressed `simple' questions like, "What is a human?" Their answer? "I can trace my lineage back 14 billion years through generations of stars. My atoms were created in stars, blown out in stellar winds or massive explosions, and soared for millions of years through space to become part of a newly forming solar system - my solar system. And back before those creator stars, there was a time when the particles that at this very moment make up my body and brain were mixing in an amorphous cloud of dark matter and quarks. Intimately woven into me are billions of bits of information that had to be encoded and tested and preserved to create me. Billions of years of cosmic evolution have produced me" (p. 281 italics in original)
It's hard to know to summarise a book I found unputdownable; almost every second page is dog-eared and underlined. Primack and Abrams speak through vivid images, stories and metaphors. Just one of these is the Cosmic Uborubos - picture a circular snake eating its own tail. From tail to fangs are the the 60 orders of magnitude between the smallest subatomic particles and the largest superclusters of galaxies. As humans, we are roughly halfway around and our sensory apparatus is tuned to pick up just a narrow sliver (from a millimetre or so, up to the size of large mountains). This range of 6 or so orders of magnitude are the realm which we consider `reality', where `common sense' works and physical intuition is reliable. The remaining 54 orders of magnitude are only available to us `with assistance': the microscope, the telescope, or mathematics and physics.
For those readers who also know about memes and theories like spiral dynamics, Primack and Abrams offer a Second Tier cosmology which fuses well verified scientific theories like relativity and evolution with those less well tested yet accepted: particle physics (subatomic particles don't exist per se, they have energy states which generate probability clouds); double dark theory (dark energy and cold dark matter fill 95% of the `space' which most of us imagine is the universe - I always thought it was a vacuum, a nothing), cosmic inflation (an explanation of how we got from the Big Bang to the irregularities which created hundreds of billions of galaxies such as our Milky Way) and the fractal theory of biological scaling (which explains why we humans can't possibly be a critter on the skin of a larger critter - they'd never be able to evolve a circulatory system large enough).
So far, this sounds like a science book right? Wrong. This is where the partnership between the authors comes in. They're a husband and wife team who teach a course at the University of California called `Cosmology and Culture'. What is a cosmology? It is "a social consensus on how to think about whatever is out there" (p. 19). A bit like memes. Especially v-memes. For example, a tremendously successful purple culture, which we call Ancient Egypt, developed a cosmology based upon multiple non-dogmatic myths, with no requirement for consistency. Monotheistic (blue) religions today continue to offer a view of the universe which many accept today: an omnipotent God, who inhabits some higher sphere, creates earth from the firmament and populates it. The inherent cosmology of most educated Westerners is the materialist (orange) Newtonian model: a sense of `cosmic homelessness' based on a view that we live on a small rock circling an insignificant heap of gas within an immense vacuum punctuated by other similar gaseous clouds and balls of rock. Green cosmologies also exist: they posit a universal `energy' or some intangible (and unprovable) universal harmonic or pulse which we can connect with should we choose to do so.
This is where Primack and Abrams shine: their move to a Second Tier cosmology which binds the scientific with the mythic. The former recognises that we have the ability, increasingly, to quantify, to test and to reason. (Some of the developments in astronomy and physics since I saw that TV documentary as a teenager 30 years ago are almost beyond belief). The latter recognises that we must develop a shared set of stories and meanings which may, one day, enable us to harness our joint efforts in the interests of saving the only planet we know of which has evolved consciousness. In a nutshell, this book's great contribution is its ability to help us integrate cosmic ideas into our lives. It's the most readable "turquoise" book I've found yet.
The perspective here offers a human-centered cosmology August 17, 2006
Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA)
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
Leading scientists and journalists have already praised VIEW FROM THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE: DISCOVERING OUR EXTRAORDINARY PLACE IN THE COSMOS: so what does this mean to the average reader who likes science? Plenty: for one thing it comes from an esteemed scientist and a lawyer and writer, so it combines technical prowess with readability for lay readers. The idea here is that the concept of the universe as a vast, impersonal space is outdated: the perspective here offers a human-centered cosmology, using the latest findings in astrophysics to back up the new approach to human-centered symbolism and how the universe as a whole is emerging. Any who've read the usual cosmological survey will see how unusual an
idea is presented in VIEW OF THE UNIVERSE - the approach changes everything.
Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch
Everybody on Earth Should Read this book! September 3, 2007
D. Evans
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
This is a wonderful book. I am not going to reveiw it here. I think every human now on Earth should read this book. I would like to send copies to Mr. Bush and Mr. Ahmadinejad. It is not a diatribe against religion but rather a scientific romance with ourselves and the story of our incredible journey through the vastness of time and space. When we hear someone say that God created the universe what are they actually saying? Saying that God created the universe tells me nothing. How we got here through aeons of time and the immensity of space is quite a story. A story that we should all know.
From the book:
"Cosmology is a branch of Astronomy and astrophysics that studies the origin and nature of the universe, and it is in the midst of a scientific revolution that is establishing its lasting foundations. What is emerging is humanity's first picture of the universe as a whole that might actually be true. There have been countless myths of the origin of the universe, but this is the first one that no storyteller made up--we are all witnesses on the edges of our seats."
The authors do argue that we are part of a kind of cosmic lottery with life emerging by chance. They remind us that we have hit the jackpot really and are in some sense fundamental to the meaning of the universe. It is up to us to give it meaning. I do not fully agree with the random jackpot explanation. Paul Davies the rather emininent cosmologist from Arizona State university also posits the idea of a cosmic jackpot but he adds a thought that I think is important to make. Human life, as such, may not have been 'planned' but the life principle itself was etched within the physical laws of the universe. Perhaps this explains why the universe is so vast and the time scales for human evolution are so great. The appearance of life is so unlikely that it needs vast time scales and vast spaces through which to roll the dice. Life is achingly rare and precious.
One thing is clear...we are all children of the Big Bang. Time to end all the religous angst and hatred. Science tells the true story of who we are and where we came from. It is time to enfold our ancient mythologies into the emerging story of mankind.
Ultimately science cannot answer the question of why the universe was created. It can answer the question of how it was created for that is the purview of science. Not that scientists have not taken a stab at the why. Paul Davies has recently posited the notion that the universe is a kind of random jackpot with the life principle etched into the laws of physics. So science takes its best shot and tells us that we are here by random chance. That is not to say that Random chance is the only and overarching explanation but that it is simply an aspect of a much greater mystery. Random chance may just be part of the answer.
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