This article is kind of adorable but quite strange. Danielson (who is the head of my department, whom I like very much, and whom I liked even more the other day when he teared up when Katie presented him with some teas on the occasion of his retirement) gives us a sort of sci-hist "cosmology wars, tracing the history of the Copernican Principle (placing us no longer at the centre of the universe--which to Copernicus was actually an elevation from a sort of solid waste planet to the stars, but beginning in the 18th century was taken as a demotion to insignificance) and the related cosmological principle (asserting the uniformity of the universe,its constant rate of expansion and the spontaneous creation of new matter to fill the gaps) and principle of mediocrity (placing us, therefore, nowhere special at all). Since the uniformity of the universe is a dead letter, he spends a lot of time looking at a post-principle of mediocrity cosmology, one that says we may be insignificant in terms of size but we are not in fact insignificant on a cosmic scale--that the phase in the development of the universe when the elements exist for life is so relatively short that the fact that we exist at a time when we can talk about how special it is that we exist at a time that we can talk about how special it is that we exist at a time etc., actually is quite special.


And that is beautiful and I'm with him. It matters in the only way that matters. And when he moves on to "and it's special that a tiny part of the universe, us, can understand the rest of it", I'm still with him, in the only way that matters. But it feel a little funny when he starts pushing for a post-Copernican world too--not so much incorrect as unnecessary; surely the real message of all this is not so much that we are at the centre after all as that there are different ways to be at the centre and in the end it doesn't really matter. and you certainly don't need to cite scientists in support of closing the door on Copernicus. It feels pushy.


But this is journalism, and so reductive, and too I understand that to a man of what I understand to be Danielson's type of faith there is a glory in some kinds of inquisitive centrality of the human that I don't feel, analogous to the Biblical literalism that I also don't need--puts things on solid ground; and a yearning therefore. And I love the optimism of all this. Essay appeared in American Scientist 97. ( )