THE VIEW FROM THE CENTRE OF THE UNIVERSE

Nancy Ellen Abrams & Joel R. Primack

After thousands of years of abstract theorizing, cosmology is

finally coming close to a testable theory to explain the nature
of the universe. Abrams and Primack argue we need the
modern equivalent of a creation myth to help fix the new
cosmological ideas in our minds.

Those of us who are alive today have an extraordinary

opportunity – the opportunity to see everything afresh through
a new understanding of the universe itself. We are witnessing
a full-blown scientific revolution in “cosmology,” the branch
of astronomy and astrophysics that studies the origin and
nature of the universe. The unrestricted, dataless fantasizing
of theorists has been replaced by reliable theory tested against
the entire visible universe. What is emerging is humanity’s
first picture of the universe as a whole that might actually be
true. We are the first humans privileged to see a face of the
universe no earlier culture ever imagined. It is possible for the
first time not only to understand the universe intellectually but
to start developing imagery that we can all use to grasp this
new reality more fully and to open our minds to what it may
mean for our lives and the lives of our descendants. As we do
this, we will discover our extraordinary place in the cosmos.
We dare not undervalue this immense privilege, even though
it is happening at the same time as some of the most barbaric
and self-defeating behaviour our species has ever exhibited.
This is all the more reason we need it.
The last time Western culture shared a coherent
understanding of the universe was in the Middle Ages. For a
thousand years, Christians, Jews, and Muslims believed that
the earth was the immovable centre of the universe and all the
planets and stars revolved on crystal spheres around it. The
hierarchy continued on earth: God had created a place for
every person, animal, and thing in a great chain of being. This
picture of reality made sense of the rigid social hierarchy of
that time. The medieval picture was destroyed by early
scientists like Galileo. The cosmic hierarchy lost its
credibility as the organizing principle of the universe and was
replaced with the Newtonian picture: a universe of endless
emptiness randomly scattered with stars, and our solar system
in no special place. This picture was not based on evidence
but was an extrapolation from Newtonian physics, which
accurately explains the motions of the solar system but by no
means the entire universe. The modern world has so deeply
absorbed this bleak picture that it seems like reality itself.
Until the late twentieth century, there was virtually no reliable
information about the universe as a whole. That has changed.
Astronomers can now observe every bright galaxy in the
visible universe and – because looking out into space is
looking back in time – can even see back to the cosmic “Dark
Ages” before galaxies formed and study in detail the heat
radiation of the Big Bang. The great movie of the evolution of
the universe is coming into clearer focus: we now know that
throughout expanding space, as the universe evolved, vast
clouds of invisible, mysterious non-atomic particles called
“dark matter” collapsed under the force of their own gravity.
In the process they pulled ordinary matter together to form
galaxies. In these galaxies generations of stars arose, whose
explosive deaths spread complex atoms from which planets
would form around new stars, providing a home for life such
as ours to evolve. Clusters, long filaments, and huge sheet-
like superclusters whose building blocks are galaxies have
formed along wrinkles in spacetime, which were apparently
generated at the earliest moments of the Big Bang and etched
into our universe forever. Every culture has had a story 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 possession of this new picture is a gift so extraordinary
that most of us don’t know what to do with it. We have been
living for centuries in a black and white film. There were no
obvious gaps in the scenes before us, so we didn’t notice that
anything was missing. Becoming aware of the universe is like
suddenly seeing in colour, and that changes not just what’s far
away but what’s right here. The universe is here, and it’s
more coherent and potentially meaningful for our lives than
anyone imagined.
Most of us have grown up thinking that there is no basis for
feeling central or even important to the physical cosmos. But
with the new evidence it turns out that this perspective is
nothing but a prejudice. There is no geographic centre to an
expanding universe, but we intelligent creatures are central or
special in multiple ways that derive directly from physics and
cosmology, and this article discusses two of them: we are
made of the rarest material – stardust – and we are at the
centre of all possible sizes in the universe. In our new book,
The View from the Centre of the Universe we also explain
that we are at the centre of the habitable zone of both the solar
system and the Milky Way and at the centre of our visible
universe, and we are living at the midpoint of time for the
universe, for Earth, and for the human species. Each form of
centrality has been a scientific discovery, not an
anthropocentric way of reading the data. Pre-scientific people
always saw themselves at the centre of the world, however
they imagined their world. They were wrong on the details,
but they were right on a deep level: the human instinct to
experience ourselves as central reflects something real about
the universe, something independent of our viewpoint.
The Rarest Material
Except for hydrogen, which makes up about a tenth of your
weight, the rest of your body is made of stardust. Hydrogen
and helium, the two lightest kinds of atoms, came straight out
of the Big Bang, while a little bit more helium and essentially
all other atoms were created later by stars. The iron atoms in
our blood carrying oxygen at this moment to our cells came
largely from exploding white dwarf stars, while the oxygen
itself came mainly from exploding supernovas that ended the
lives of massive stars. Most of the carbon in the carbon
dioxide we exhale on every breath came from planetary
nebulas, the death clouds of middle-size stars a little bigger
than the sun. We are made of material created and ejected into
the Galaxy by the violence of earlier stars. To understand how
this happened – to appreciate the millions or billions of years
it takes a star to produce a comparatively tiny number of
heavy atoms, and the tremendous space journeys of those
particles of stardust that have now come together to incarnate
us – is a first step toward finding our place in the cosmos.
All the stars, planets, gas, comets, dust, and galaxies that we
see – all forms of visible matter – make up only about half a
percent of what’s out there. Most of the matter in the universe
is neither atomic nor visible. It is not even made of the
protons, neutrons, and electrons that compose atoms. It’s an
utterly strange substance called “cold dark matter,” and its
existence was only established late in the 20th century. But it
accounts for about 25% of the universe. Dark matter neither
emits, reflects nor absorbs light or any other kind of radiation,
but its immense gravity holds the spinning galaxies together.
But 70% of the density of the universe is not even matter –
it’s “dark energy.” Dark energy causes space to repel space.
The more space there is – and increasing amounts of space are
inevitable in an expanding universe – the more repulsion. The
more repulsion, the faster space expands, and this can lead to
an exponentially increasing expansion possibly forever. The
Double Dark theory explains how dark matter and dark
energy interact over time to create the universe we observe.
Dark energy is in the nature of space itself. The Double Dark
theory’s history of the universe is basically this: in the early
universe there was relatively little dark energy because there
was relatively little space – the universe hadn’t had time to
expand very much, but there was the same amount of dark
matter then as now. For about nine billion years, the
gravitational attraction of the dark matter slowed the rate of
expansion. The dark matter thinned out as the universe
expanded, but since dark energy is a characteristic of space, it
never thins out; instead its relative importance has
tremendously increased with the amount of space. Now the
repulsive effect of the dark energy has surpassed the
gravitational attraction of dark matter as the dominant effect
on large scales in the universe, and expansion is no longer
slowing down but accelerating. The turning point was about
four and a half billion years ago – coincidentally just when
our solar system was forming.
All earlier cosmologies have been shared through symbolic
images and stories. We too need to visualize our universe –
not just random fragments of it, which is all that even the
most stunning NASA astronomical photos give us, but the
whole – so that we can see where we fit. Since 99% of the
universe is invisible, the only way to visualize the whole is
symbolically.
The Pyramid of All Visible Matter borrows an image
everyone in the United States possesses: the pyramid topped
by the all-seeing eye, which appears on the back of the dollar
bill. The pyramid’s capstone is separated and floating above
it, blazing with light, and dominated by an eye. This symbol
can represent all the visible matter in the
universe – all the matter that people until the late twentieth
century thought existed. The volume of each section of the
pyramid is proportional to the density of that particular
ingredient in the universe. The large bottom part of the
pyramid represents the lightest atoms: hydrogen and helium,
which are so plentiful that they far outweigh all the heavy
atoms – the stardust – that makes up not only living things but
Earth and all rocky planets in the universe. Within the
capstone, the fraction of stardust associated just with living
things or the remains of living things is very tiny. Within that
very tiny fraction, the matter associated specifically with
intelligent life is vanishingly small – yet it is only that which
looks at and grasps this pyramid. The very human-looking
eye at the centre of the capstone represents the trace bit of
stardust associated with intelligent life. The eye is the only
part not drawn to scale. Think of it as being like an enlarged
detail of a city centre, inset on the corner of a large-scale map.
The inset is way out of proportion to the size of things
surrounding it, but everyone knows that an inset on a map is a
zoom-in visualizing something important on a different size
scale. Here, in the same way, the eye on the capstone is a
zoom-in to the presence of intelligent life. Without a zoom-in
we could not even see the matter associated with intelligence
on the pyramid, since it is so rare. Intelligence bursts out only
from tiny bits of stardust

The Pyramid of all Visible Matter stands on the solid ground

of Earth with a few plants for emphasis. But now we know
that there is a hidden base extending deep underground. This
is shown in the second figure, which we call the Cosmic
Density Pyramid.
When astronomers look into space, they see only the
illuminated half a percent of what’s out there. It is as though
great fleets of ghost ships made of dark matter sail through
the cosmic ocean of dark energy, but in the blackness all we
humans see are a few beacons lit at the tips of the tallest
masts. Ordinary matter interacts with itself: particles interact
to form atoms, atoms interact to form molecules, and under at
least some circumstances molecules can form living cells and
eventually evolve into higher life forms. But dark matter does
none of this. When viewed in computer simulations that make
dark matter visible, the stuff behaves like nothing anyone has
ever seen before. Gravity swings clumps of it around in the
presence of other clumps, but they can pass right through each
other. Dark matter has some of the properties people imagine
of ghosts: it goes through things, yet it has power over the
ordinary world. Our kind of matter does not take up much
space or contribute much to the total density of the universe,
but it contributes out of all proportion to the richness of the
universe.
 The centre of all possible sizes

In mathematics numbers go on infinitely in both directions,

but in physics there are a largest and a smallest size. The
interplay of relativity and quantum mechanics sets the
smallest size: general relativity tells us that there can’t be
more than a certain amount of mass squeezed into a region of
any given size. If more mass is packed in than the region can
hold, gravity there becomes so intense that the region itself –
the space – collapses to no size at all: a black hole. Any object
compressed enough will hit this limit and suddenly become a
black hole. Meanwhile, quantum mechanics also sets a
minimum size limit but in a very peculiar way. The “size” of
a particle is actually the size of the
region in which you can confidently locate it. The smaller the
region in which the particle is confined, the more energy it
takes, and more energy is equivalent to larger mass. There
turns out to be a unique, very small size where the maximum
mass that relativity allows to be crammed in without the
region collapsing into a black hole is also
the minimum mass that quantum mechanics allows to be
confined in so tiny a region. That size, about 10-33 cm, is
called the Planck length. We have no way to talk or even
think about anything smaller in our current understanding of
physics. The largest size we can see is that of the visible
universe; the distance to the cosmic horizon is about 1028 cm.
From the Planck length to the cosmic horizon is a difference
of about 60 orders of magnitude. The number 1060 is
extremely big, but it’s not infinite. It’s comprehensible. With
it, we have something to compare our size to. Adapting an
idea of Sheldon Glashow, a 1979 Nobel laureate in physics,
we borrow the ancient symbol of the uroboros – a serpent
swallowing its tail – and reinterpret it as the “Cosmic
Uroboros.”

The Cosmic Uroboros represents the universe as a continuity

of vastly different size scales. The tip of the serpent’s tail
corresponds to the Planck length, and its head to the visible
universe. Travelling clockwise around the serpent from head
to tail, the icons represent the size of the cosmic horizon
(1028 cm), the size of a supercluster of galaxies (1025), a
single galaxy, the distance from Earth to the Great Nebula in
Orion, the solar system, the sun, the earth, a mountain,
humans, an ant, a single-celled creature such as the E. coli
bacterium, a strand of DNA, an atom, a nucleus, the scale of
the weak interactions (carried by the W and Z particles), and
approaching the tail the extremely small size scales on which
physicists hope to find massive dark matter (DM) particles,
and on even smaller scales a Grand Unified Theory (GUT) .

The size of a human being is near the centre of all possible

sizes. And conscious beings like us couldn’t be anywhere
else. Much smaller creatures would not have enough atoms to
be sufficiently complex, while much larger ones would suffer
from slow internal communication (limited by the speed of
light) – which would mean that they would effectively be
communities rather than individuals, like groups of
communicating people, or supercomputers made up of many
smaller processors.
On different size scales, different physical laws control
events. For example, gravity is all-powerful on the scale of
planets, stars, and galaxies, but on the sub-atomic scale,
gravity is utterly irrelevant, and the weak and strong forces
control. On neither of these size scales is electromagnetism
important, yet on the human scale it’s what makes chemistry
work and our bodies function. Size matters. The jurisdiction
of physical laws is limited to a range of size scales, and this is
the reason we can’t extrapolate from what is true on earth to
what’s true in the universe – nor can we extrapolate safely in
any context when the numbers or sizes we’re dealing with
differ by many orders of magnitude. This was a fatal flaw of
the Newtonian picture.
The island of size scales surrounding human beings is the
“reality” in which common sense works and normal physical
intuition is reliable. Most of us are rarely conscious of
anything smaller than an insect or larger than the sun. These
sizes define humanity’s native region of the universe, our true
homeland. It’s not a geographical location: it’s a point of view
– a setting of the intellectual zoom lens. We have named this
central range of size scales “Midgard” because in the Old
Norse mythological cosmos, Midgard was the human world.
It was an island representing stability and civilized society in
the middle of the world-sea, the Norse universe. The world-
sea was large, and there was room not only for Midgard but
for the land of the giants and the land of the gods. This is an
excellent description – metaphorically, of course – of
Midgard as the centre of the expanding universe. Our
Midgard is the island of size scales that are familiar and
comprehensible to human beings. But beyond the shores of
Midgard in one direction – outward – into the expanding
world-sea is the land of incomprehensibly giant beings, like
black holes a million times the mass of the sun and galaxies
made of hundreds of billions of stars. In the other direction
from Midgard – inward, toward the small – lies a living
cellular world, and beyond that the quantum world, and these
microlands are the evolutionary and physical sources of
everything we are. That may not make them gods, but
compared to us they are more prolific, more ancient,
universal, and omnipresent. Like the Norse Midgard, our
Midgard is not isolated from these other lands in the world-
sea.
The bridge is the Cosmic Uroboros.
Midgard spans about fourteen orders of magnitude, from 10-2
cm to 1012 cm, holding everything for which people have
intuition. The figure also shows the approximate decade and
technology by which scientists discovered the rest of the
Cosmic Uroboros. The concept of Midgard has implications.
People disagree on just about everything that has to do with
spirituality, but the one thing they do tend to agree on is that
whatever the spiritual may be, it’s not physical. Midgard,
however, helps us understand why this “physical/spiritual”
dichotomy is an illusion. Backing up a bit, in medieval
cosmology heaven was understood to be physically
enveloping the sphere of the fixed stars at a finite distance
away from Earth (so close that in Dante’s Paradiso it was
possible from the height of Paradise to see the shoreline from
Asia to Cadiz). But after medieval cosmology was
overthrown by the Newtonian picture, space was understood
to go on forever, leaving no geographical location for heaven.
God was said to be “outside the universe” or “in the heart.”
Today most people still have the idea that the spiritual, if it
exists at all, is mysteriously other than the physical or
material world and “transcends” the physical universe. The
concept of Midgard erases this, not by telling us what the
spiritual is, but what the physical is.
Very large and very small structures on the Cosmic Uroboros
are not physical in the usual sense of the term. Superclusters
of galaxies are expanding apart and in billions of years will
disperse; they’re not bound together by gravity but by our
dot-connecting minds. In the opposite direction from Midgard
toward the very small, there are elementary particles that are
not really “physical” particles but rather quantum mechanical
ones that are routinely in two or more places at once. The
strange truth is that what we usually think of as “physical” is
a property of Midgard, perhaps the defining property, and
thus Midgard is what people generally think of as the
“physical” universe. Beyond Midgard, however, lies most of
the Cosmic Uroboros.
“Transcendence” should not be thought of as an imaginary
leap to some place “outside” the universe. Transcendence is
what happens many times within this universe, every few
powers of ten. For example, on the atomic and subatomic
scales, “human” means nothing. There is no humanness to our
atoms. Whether atoms are inside us, inside a rock, or drifting
through space, is all the same to them. On the atomic scale,
therefore, even inside our own bodies we do not exist. “We”
are something that transcends atoms. In the same way the
universe as a whole transcends familiar Midgard. Amazingly,
in this interpretation the difference between spiritual and
physical becomes – in an approximate way – quantifiable
with powers of ten. Things larger than about 1012 cm, or
smaller than about 10-2 cm, can only be known through
science and only experienced, if at all, spiritually. This
includes most of the universe. The Cosmic Uroboros is a
context for those exotic size scales of the universe that no one
ever had a connection with before. Seeing and living on
multiple levels at once is what “cosmic connection” is all
about. It is not mystical; it is as practical – and essential – as
the visualizations that athletes do before a competition, or
concert pianists before they go out on stage. It situates us in
reality at our best.
As a culture we now have the scientific ability to see so much
more deeply into the universe than ancient people, yet most
people experience the universe so much less and connect with
it almost not at all. Widespread cultural indifference to the
universe is a staggering reality of our time – and possibly our
biggest mental handicap in solving global problems. We have
libraries full of creation stories, and a culture of scepticism.
Without a believable story that explains the world we actually
live in, people have no idea how to think about the big
picture. And without a big picture, we are very small people.
A human without a cosmology is like a pebble lying near the
top of a great mountain, in contact with its little indentation in
the dirt and the pebbles immediately surrounding it, but
oblivious to its stupendous view.
Religious stories can still arouse in many people a sense of
contact with something greater than we are – but that
“something” is nothing like what is really out there. We don’t
have to pretend to live in some traditional picture of the
universe just to reap the benefit of the mythic language
popularly associated with that traditional picture. People
around the world should be able to portray our universe with
all the power and majesty that earlier peoples evoked in
expressing their own cosmologies. Mythic language is not the
possession of any specific religion but is a human tool, and
we need it today to talk about the meaning of our universe.
Big changes are happening on our planet, and shepherding
ourselves through them successfully is going to require
tremendous creativity. An essential ingredient may be a
cosmic perspective, and such a perspective is just becoming
available.

Nancy Ellen Abrams and Joel R. Primack's The View from the Centre of the
Universe is published by Fourth Estate.