The Sky’s the Limit
Artists and scientists, Robert Oppenheimer wrote, “live always at the ‘edge of mystery’--the boundary of the unknown” and for no group of scientific practitioners is this characterization more apposite than cosmologists, they who dare to envision the universal whole.
Few areas of inquiry bring human minds so constantly into contact with the event horizons of current understanding, so posing the greatest challenges. As a creative response to the ineluctable desire to know how and from whence we arise, cosmological theorizing, for all its claims to truth, is an exercise of the grandest sort in myth-making. That at least is the thesis underlying Marc Lachieze-Rey and Jean-Pierre Luminet’s sumptuous “Celestial Treasury.”
Ostensibly a history of (primarily Western) cosmological thinking, “Celestial Treasury” advances a far more radical agenda. Rather than presenting their subject as a progressive history, onward and upward from pagan darkness to the light of contemporary scientific genius, Luminet and Lachieze-Rey subversively interweave ancient and modern ideas, continually, if gently, alerting the reader to profound resonances between past and present.
For all our superior observational technology, our sophisticated theoretical frameworks and our fiendishly complex mathematics, we are not so far from our forebears as we often like to think.
Consider the ancient Greeks’ idea that everything in the physical world is composed of four basic elements: earth, water, air and fire. Antiquated baloney, you might think, but Luminet and Lachieze-Rey point out that contemporary physics rests on a not-dissimilar premise.
Today the four “elemental” constituents said to be responsible for all phenomena are the four fundamental forces: gravity, the electromagnetic force and the strong and weak nuclear forces (which hold together the nuclei of atoms). These forces, they write, “have an identical function to the elements of the classical world.”
In our drive to know the universe, it is the imagination that engages first, long before the analytical or empiricist spirit kicks in. Johannes Kepler, the great precursor to Isaac Newton and the founding father of modern astrophysics, envisioned the universe as God’s play: As he saw it, the aim of the astronomer was to learn to play God’s game. To do that, the mind must be open to the “facts,” but critically it must also be creatively susceptible. As Albert Einstein once declared: “The gift of fantasy has meant more to me than any talent for abstract, positive thought.”
Throughout history, the creative impulse has been a central engine of cosmological theorizing. Take, for example, the Greek and medieval view that the dance of the planets and stars must be explained by a combination of strictly circular motions. Just as a windup ballerina can be made to perform a complex dance, even though her mechanism consists only of circular gears, so cosmologists for 2,000 years believed the motions of the heavenly bodies could be described by an intricate celestial clockwork.
The apotheosis of this imaginative mechanizing was the dizzyingly elaborate system of the Alexandrian astronomer Claudius Ptolemy. So complex was Ptolemy’s system that in the 13th century Alfonso the Great, seeing the labors of his astronomers, is said to have remarked that had he been present at the Creation he would have given the Lord some hints about simplification. The Ptolemaic conception of the cosmos dominated both Arab and European views of the heavens until the 17th century, when Kepler, Newton and others radically re-envisioned the universe, replacing the cosmic gears with a quasi-infinite network of stellar masses held in place by the force of gravity.
But be not so quick to judge Ptolemy’s vision. Luminet and Lachieze-Rey (an astronomer and astrophysicist, respectively) note that in principle a Ptolemaic-style system could account for the heavenly dance with a high degree of accuracy. In the 19th century, the French mathematician Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier demonstrated that, in fact, any periodic motion can be described by a combination of circular motions.
Moreover, physics today retains a love affair with the circle. Current favorite contender for a unified theory of the four forces is string theory, which holds that all particles can be understood as the various vibrational states of microscopic circular loops, or “strings.”
Throughout history, cosmological ideas have refracted again and again through our mental prisms, metamorphosing into new variations on old themes. One of the great joys of this book is seeing the ways in which certain tropes keep returning, as if they hold some peculiar power of enchantment over the human mind.
Perhaps my favorite example is the continually recurring fascination with the Platonic solids: a unique set of five forms whose crystalline symmetry has held artists and astronomers, mystics and mathematicians in thrall for thousands of years. As with the cube, whose faces are all squares, the Platonic solids are perfectly regular polyhedra, having all their faces the same. There are just five such forms possible: along with the cube (which has six sides), are the tetrahedron (four sides), the octahedron (eight sides), the icosahedron (20 sides) and the dodecahedron (12 sides). Since their discovery, these five forms have been imbued with almost mystical power.
Plato paired the first four with the four basic elements: Earth was paired with the cube, water with the icosahedron and so on. The fifth, the dodecahedron, he equated with the supposed fifth element, or quintessence, the mysterious substance of which the celestial bodies were said to be composed.
In the 17th century, Kepler thought he had found in these five forms the secret of the planets’ arrangement in the solar system. He turned out to be wrong, but, bizarrely, the idea of a polyhedral arrangement to the cosmos has resurfaced within the framework of general relativity, which allows for some truly extraordinary topologies, including ones in which space takes on a pseudo-crystalline structure.
One such arrangement is an infinite lattice of dodecahedrons. “Celestial Treasury” includes an exquisite computer image of this enigmatic spatial structure from the Geometry Center at the University of Minnesota.
In making their case for cosmological resonances through the ages, Luminet and Lachieze-Rey critically rely not just on words but also on pictures. The uniqueness of this book lies in its juxtaposition of historical images with those generated by contemporary astrophysics, such as the contrasting of Kepler’s polyhedral model with the Minnesota computer model.
Likewise, illustrations from medieval manuscripts of the six days of biblical creation sit side by side with computer simulations of black holes and the origins of space time; Renaissance visions of stellar vortexes are paired with photographs of spiral galaxies taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.
Replete with extended foldouts and delicately detailed inserts, “Celestial Treasury” is a stunningly beautiful survey of the science, mythology and iconography of the cosmos through the ages. This is the most gorgeous coffee-table cosmology book in years.
Such lavish production bespeaks its origins: The book is an offshoot of a 1998 exhibition entitled “Figures du Ciel” at the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, and it is from that library’s extensive collection that most of the older images are taken.
As with two recently ended and superb exhibitions in our own city--”Treasures of the Great Libraries of Los Angeles” at the UCLA Hammer Museum and “Devices of Wonder” at the Getty--”Celestial Treasury” demonstrates that science can be an engine not only of knowledge but also of aesthetic inspiration. Beneath the radar of pedagogical impulse, science, like art, stirs our imaginations.
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From ‘Paradise Lost’ By John Milton
Then stay’d the fervid wheels and in his hand
He took the golden compasses, prepared
In God’s eternal store, to circumscribe
This Universe, and all created things.
One foot he centred, and the other turned
Round through the vast profundity obscure,
And said, “Thus far extended, thus far thy bounds;
This be thy just circumference, O World!”
Thus God the Heaven created, thus the Earth,
Matter unform’d and void.
--from “Celestial Treasury”
