Cosmology and Culture

Cosmology and Culture

Joel R. Primack

Professor of Physics, University of California, Santa Cruz

There is no way to describe scientifically the origin of the universe without treading upon territory held
for millennia to be sacred. Beliefs about the origin of the universe are at the root of our consciousness as
human beings. This is a place where science, willingly or unwillingly, encounters concerns traditionally
associated with a spiritual dimension.

For thousands of years people have wondered, speculated, and argued about the origin of the universe
without actually knowing anything about it. In the closing years of the twentieth century, we're learning
enough to begin to peer across the gulf that separates our universe from its source at the beginning of-or
perhaps before-the Big Bang. A story is emerging in modern cosmology that will, if it follows the pattern
of earlier shifts in cosmology, change our culture in ways no one can yet predict. It is important to start
now to speculate on the possible meanings for our time of this emerging cosmological story. Rather than
assuming that science and spirit are separate jurisdictions, I assume that reality is one, and that truth
grows and evolves with the universe of which it speaks.

Why is this important? In a speech given in July 1994, on the state of the world and its prospects, the
Czech poet-president Vaclav Havel said that the planet is in transition. As vastly different cultures
collide, all consistent value systems are collapsing. We cannot foresee the results. Science, which has
been the bedrock of industrial civilization for so long, he said, "fails to connect with the most intrinsic
nature of reality and with natural human experience. It is now more a source of disintegration and doubt
than a source of integration and meaning.... We may know immeasurably more about the universe than
our ancestors did, and yet it increasingly seems they knew something more essential about it than we do,
something that escapes us.... Paradoxically, inspiration for the renewal of this lost integrity can once
again be found in science...a science producing ideas that in a certain sense allow it to transcend its own
limits.... Transcendence is the only real alternative to extinction." [1]

Modern cosmology is now undergoing a foundation-building revolution as it seeks a verifiable

description of the nature and origin of the universe. This revolution may require that we transcend
previous notions of space, time, and even reality. This seems to me the kind of science Havel is hoping
for-a science whose metaphors may illuminate not only the subject matter of its own field but possibly
also problems of humanity and the earth from a cosmic perspective.

Every religion is a metaphor system, and like scientific theories, every religious myth is limited. Perhaps
progress in religion can occur as it does in science: without invalidating a theory, a greater myth may
encompass it respectfully, the way General Relativity encompasses Newtonian Mechanics. In the next
few decades, powerful ideas of modern cosmology could inspire a spiritual renaissance, but they could

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also be totally ignored by almost everyone as irrelevant and elitist. In the worst of circumstances, they
could be abusively interpreted and turned into a tool of exploitation-as some would contend that the
medieval hierarchical cosmology was interpreted as a justification for a hierarchical organization of
society in which the vast majority of people were oppressed. How well our cosmology is interpreted in
language meaningful to ordinary people will determine how well its elemental stories are understood,
which may in turn affect how positive the consequences for society turn out to be. There is a moral
responsibility involved in tampering with the underpinnings of reality.

Anthropologists tell us that in virtually all traditional cultures, a cosmology is what gives its members
their fundamental sense of where they come from, who they are, and what their personal role in life's
larger picture might be. Cosmology is whatever picture of the universe a culture agrees on. Together with
the picture-upholding the picture-is a story that is understood to explain the sacred relationship between
the way the world is and the way human beings should behave. Other cultures' stories may not have been
correct by modern scientific standards, but they were valid by their own standards, and they had the
power to ground people's codes of behavior and their sense of identity within a larger picture. This sense
of identity may be part of what Havel feels has been lost.

What is the current popular picture of the universe?

If you ask a modern audience of people fascinated by cosmology but untrained in it to close their eyes
and visualize the universe, some will report seeing endless space with stars scattered unimaginably far
apart, others will see great spiral galaxies, and others will see an exotic scene such as the rising of an
ember-red moon over an unknown planet. They do not realize that these are merely snapshots on a given
scale of the universe-no more representative of the universe as a whole than is a single molecule of DNA
or a moonrise over your own backyard. The strange fact is that in modern Western culture people have
only the foggiest idea how to picture the universe, and certainly no consensus on it.

The lack of social consensus on cosmology in the modern world has caused many people to close off
their thinking to large issues and long time scales, so that small matters dominate their consciousness. Of
course, modern people do know much more about many things than members of isolated, traditional
cultures, but we are not so different in our basic needs from people millennia ago. We have to get our
sense of context somewhere. It is worth looking at earlier cosmologies and the cultures in which they
held sway in order to understand how deep and in fact inextricable the connection is.

Earlier Cosmologies
In Biblical times when people looked up at a clear, blue sky, they saw a transparent dome that covered
the entire flat earth [2]. It was an awesome object, created by God himself on the second day to hold back
the endless quantities of blue water clearly visible above it. There was water above and water beyond the
horizon; doubtless there was also water below. God had divided the waters "above" from the waters
"below" by constructing this immense dome that held open the space for dry land. In ancient Egypt the

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dome had been the goddess Nut, who arched her back over the earth so that only her hands and feet
touched the ground. She was the night sky, and the sun, the god Ra, was born from her every morning
[3]. In the Hebrew Bible the dome is called "raqi'a," meaning a firm substance, and rendered in the King
James translation as "the firmament"-a concept that cannot be understood independently of the flat earth
cosmology in which it made sense. The firmament in Biblical times was understood to be firm only by
the will of God. If God were angered, as everyone believed had actually happened in the time of Noah,
"the windows of heaven" and "the fountains of the deep" could burst open once again and those lovely
blue waters would destroy the earth. God was said to have promised not to do it a second time and to
have sealed this covenant with the rainbow, but who could predict the behavior of God? A watery Sword
of Damocles hung over every creature on the flat earth, and God held the threads.

At more or less the same time that the Hebrew Bible as we know it was being compiled-about the 5th
century BCE-Greek philosophers lived in a different universe. Their earth was not flat and domed but a
round celestial object. Aristotle honed the picture so that the lunar sphere-a sphere the size of the orbit of
the moon-was defined as the border between the earthly world of change and decay inside and the
perfect, unchanging heavens outside. With modifications by the 2d century CE Alexandrian astronomer
Ptolemy, who added details to account for careful astronomical observations, Aristotle's image of
concentric spheres, and not the Bible's flat domed earth, had become by the Middle Ages the universe for
Jews, Moslems, and Christians alike.

Thus on a clear night in Medieval Europe, a person looking up into the cathedral of the sky would have
seen huge, transparent spheres nested inside each other, encircling the center of the universe, the earth
[4]. In an uneasy alliance with Christian theology the planets were still identified with the Ancient
Roman gods Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, and were still believed by many to be divine
enough to influence people's lives. Immediately outside the sphere of the fixed stars lay Heaven. This
was the monotheistic compromise with Aristotle and Ptolemy. God was physically right out there.
Everything between heaven and earth had its eternal place, chosen by God. A worm in the soil, the
lowliest serf, and the king himself had been placed by God exactly where they belonged in the great
chain of being, and there was no questioning the divine hierarchy. The hierarchies of church, nobility,
and the family were divinely sanctioned-they mirrored the cosmos itself. We may scoff that they saw
such a cosmos, but not that they took the cosmos as the sacred model for society. They understood that
humans can only be content by seeking to be in harmony with the universe. This is a lesson our culture
could do well to learn.

A new cosmology is subversive in the deepest sense of the word. The stable center was torn out of the
Medieval universe at the beginning of the 17th century, when Galileo's observations showed that the
Aristotelian-Ptolemaic earth-centered picture was wrong, and Kepler's geometric interpretations of
Tycho Brahe's data were built upon the sun-centered model that Copernicus had put forward more than
sixty years earlier [5]. Europe's conceptual universe was shaken. Like unreinforced buildings in an
earthquake, the power structures of society were irreparably cracked and undermined, and this was soon
obvious to all thinking people. As John Donne wrote in 1611 upon learning about Galileo's telescopic
observations:

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The new Philosophy calls all in doubt,

The Element of fire is quite put out;
The Sun is lost, and th'earth, and no man's wit
Can well direct him where to look for it...
'Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone;
All just supply, and all Relation;
Prince, Subject, Father, Son, are things forgot... [6]

If earth was not the cosmic foundation, then nothing supported these human hierarchies any more. They
could only continue by force of habit or by force of arms, and the church recognized this. When Galileo
ridiculed the 1500-year old Ptolemaic cosmology in his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World
Systems, the Church forced him to recant and held him under house arrest for the rest of his life.

This was a frightening and sobering event for scientists all over Europe. It was perhaps only Galileo's
status as the best known scientist of his time that saved him from being burned at the stake as Giordano
Bruno had been. Eventually, following the lead of Bacon and Descartes, science protected itself by
entering into a de facto pact of noninterference with religion: science would restrict its authority to the
material world, and religion would hold unchallenged authority over matters of human meaning and the
spirit. By the time Isaac Newton was born in 1642, the year of Galileo's death, the spoils of reality had
been divided. The physical world and the world of human meaning were now two separate universes.

With the rise of modern science, standards of explanation became demanding in a way that neither art
nor spiritual vision could satisfy, although for millennia these had been the sacred pair that together
created the human-centered universes of all earlier societies. For more than 300 years, since the time of
Isaac Newton, science has been understood by most educated people to imply an image of the universe as
infinite, or at least incomprehensibly vast, almost empty space, with stars scattered at great distances
from each other but no center, no purpose, no location for God, and no obvious implications for human
behavior. Blaise Pascal wrote, "engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces whereof I know nothing and
which know nothing of me, I am terrified.... The eternal silence of these infinite spaces alarms me."[7]
With an image of a cold universe in which humans play no necessary role whatsoever, and no serious
explanation of how things got this way, a society suffers from a kind of rootlessness that prevents a sense
of connection with the universe.

The disorienting impact upon Western culture of losing any agreed-upon sense of the universe may well
be responsible for some of the social chaos of the last centuries, but in a world that values science there
may have been no way to avoid this. It may have been necessary to wait for science to run its course
while people contented themselves with what fragmentary philosophical or religious insights could be
found. But scientific cosmology today has entered a golden age of discovery because of a combination of
extraordinary new instruments and telescopes on the one hand and daring theoretical breakthroughs on
the other. Data is flooding in, and cosmological theories are being honed to levels of precision
unimaginable even a generation ago. We may see in the first decades of the 21st century the emergence
of a new universe picture that can be globally acceptable, and with this and the contributions of image-

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making writers, artists, and spiritual visionaries, it is possible that the painful centuries-long hiatus in
human connection with the universe will end. Many people will mentally remain in earlier universes, as
they do today, but for those who continue to seek truth, whether through science or spirituality, there will
be a universe for our time. This universe could become the most inspiring source of new ways of
interpreting and addressing the problems of our planet. It is not Utopian to imagine that this could
happen, since some variant of "as above, so below" is the way humans have functioned for most of our
species' history, excluding only the last few centuries. The challenge will be to use for the first time a
complicated and counter-intuitive cosmos as a model-ironically, one in which we return to that phrase
knowing there is no above or below.

Since it is important not only to say what is needed but to attempt to provide it, I will present one
possible example of a way of looking at the universe that is consistent, as far as it goes, with what we
understand of the universe today yet is simple, graphic, highly suggestive, and carries the mythic
undertones essential to an appreciation of the power of a cosmology. This representation is not a picture
of the universe but a symbol.

The Cosmic Uroboros

In daily speech "the universe" is essentially used as a basket term, a word invented to contain everything
people can imagine, defined or undefined. In modern cosmology, however, the universe is something it
itself, something evolving, something mysterious. But it cannot be pictured the way a galaxy, for
example, can be pictured in a photograph or painting for at least three reasons: First, a photograph is of
something outside the eye, and the universe is not outside us, and we are never outside it. We are it on
our scale. Second, a photograph captures a moment in time, but the universe encompasses time itself and
no slice of time can even suggest that. And third, the universe cannot be imagined as a picture because
it's almost all invisible dark matter. Moreover, all the radiation in the universe is also invisible to us,
except for the tiny band of frequencies between red and blue. It is essential to give up trying to imagine
the universe through the eyes, yet people need something visual.

The best solution I have found is to represent the universe using one of the oldest symbols for it known to
humankind, a symbol found in countless cultures around the globe. It is the snake swallowing its tail-an
"uroboros" as the Greeks called it. Earlier peoples used it to represent eternal life, partly because snakes
were often believed to live forever, since the sloughing of their skin was seen as a rebirth; and partly
because the circle of its body was a cycle without end. The uroboros had different meanings in different
cultures, but it tended to represent whatever was seen as fundamental in a culture. Now it might carry a
new interpretation.

From the Planck scale to the cosmic horizon, the visible universe encompasses about 60 orders of
magnitude. The size scales of the universe can thus be arrayed around the serpent like minutes around the
face of a clock. Sheldon Glashow originally suggested this symbol, with the swallowing of the tail
expressing his hope for a unification of the theories governing the largest and smallest scales [8]. I
noticed [9] that there are many connections across the diagram: electromagnetism dominates the bottom;

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the strong and weak interactions not only dominate on nuclear scales but also describe energy generation
in stars and deermine the composition of planetary systems; and dark matter, which is gravitationally
dominant on galactic and larger scales, may be associated with the physics of still smaller scales.

The Cosmic Uroboros represents the universe as a continuity of vastly different size scales, of which the
largest and smallest may be linked by gravity. Sixty orders of magnitude separate the very smallest from
the very largest. Traveling around the serpent from head to tail, we move from the scale of the cosmic
horizon to that of a galaxy supercluster, a single galaxy, the solar system, the sun, the moon, a mountain,
a human, a single-celled creature, a strand of DNA, an atom, a nucleus, the scale of the weak
interactions, and approaching the tail the extremely small size scales on which physicists hope to find
evidence for Supersymmetry (SUSY), dark matter particles such as the axion, and a Grand Unified
Theory. There are other connections between large and small: electromagnetic forces are most important
from the scale of atoms to that of mountains; strong and weak forces govern both atomic nuclei and stars;
cosmic inflation may have created the large-scale of the universe out of quantum-scale fluctuations.

Why is this symbol useful? People asked to visualize "the universe" will far more often think of the
largest thing they know of than the smallest. Few realize that the universe exists on all scales,
everywhere, all the time. This is a truly extravagant thought. Largeness is by no means the most
important characteristic of the universe. Focusing on it makes people feel small, not because they are, but

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because they are simply ignoring all scales smaller than themselves in thinking about the universe. On
the Cosmic Uroboros, as I call it, if the mouth swallowing the tail is drawn at the top, humans (at one
meter or so) fall more or less at the bottom-i.e., at the center of all the size scales in the visible universe.
Many students are so stunned by this apparently special place that they refuse to believe it and insist it
must be a result of some tricky choice of units. I don't know if the center of the Cosmic Uroboros is in
fact special, but finding themselves there certainly strikes a chord with most people. Perhaps it hearkens
back to the soul-satisfying cosmology of the Middle Ages, where earth was truly the center of the
universe.

At different scales, different laws of physics tend to control events. The Cosmic Uroboros thus becomes
not only a way of realizing that the universe exists on all scales but also a map of emergent properties,
with new properties appearing as you move a few orders of magnitude in either direction along the body
of the serpent.

What the Uroboros does not represent is evolution. Modern cosmology will never be fully represented by
a single idea. It contains several ideas that are each powerful enough to change people's thinking, if they
can be communicated. Another example is Cosmic Inflation, which, of course, may or may not be true,
but is the best explanation we have today for the initial conditions that led to the Big Bang and the
relatively slow but stable expansion of the universe that has followed. In the tradition of "as above, so
below," here is a suggestion [10] of how present-day issues could be seen in a new way through the
metaphor of Cosmic Inflation.

It is well known that modern technological nations are addicted to overconsumption at the expense of
poorer peoples and the global environment, yet our nations seem powerless to change course. While the
global population increased about four-fold from 1860 to 1991, energy use increased by nearly two
orders of magnitude. We have been told by experts for decades that the human species is heading for
disaster on a potentially monstrous scale unless we change our ways, but most of us remain addicted to
consumerism. The single most important question of this generation may be, how can global civilization
make the transition gracefully from inflationary consumption to a sustainable level? No answer has been
be found in normal political processes. I think it was Einstein who said that no fundamental problem is
ever solved at the same level at which it is posed. On what level then might a solution be found?
Mathematically meaningful patterns of the universe-for example, the transition from cosmic inflation to
expansion-may exist on a human scale too. Applying them to large-scale human problems could burst us
out of the narrow perspective within which these problems have seemed intractable. This narrow
perspective justifies its failures with a trendy cynicism that threatens to doom us. In the larger
perspective may lie Einstein's kind of solution.

In "Cosmology and Culture," our course at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Nancy Abrams and I
trace the effects of the major changes in cosmology in the cultures that were the soil and roots of our
own. In alternate weeks, more or less, we look at the universe-pictures of the Ancient Middle East and
Greece, of Medieval Christian and Jewish (Kabbalistic) Europe, of the Enlightenment cosmology of
Newton, and of the global consumer world culture of today. In alternate weeks we introduce the
fundamental elements of the expanding universe picture. We encourage students to think about how the

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emerging scientific cosmology may change their own worldviews.

Probably more than any particular knowledge or material goods, our society needs inspiration. This may
be the only thing capable of drastically changing enough minds so that the human species does not, in
Einstein's phrase, "drift toward unparalled catastrophes." Scientific research to me is not only an
intellectual passion, therefore, but with luck will also make a social contribution-of inspiration, which is
about as spiritual a concept as one can imagine. In this way, practicing science has a spiritual goal. In
fact, it can be itself a spiritual practice.

Scientific Research as a Spiritual Practice

It is often said that science is the religion of the modern world. This may be true for many members of
the modern world who see only the impressive results of science and do not understand the processes by
which these results come to be. Worship is always possible in the face of mystery. But science is not a
religion for a research scientist like me. Without attempting to define religion, I will say that for me,
science as a spiritual practice involves no dogmas or creeds, no human authority, no sacred text, and no
divine being. There are aspects of science that involve all these factors except the last, but they are not
the spiritual aspects.

These are four ways in which science is for me a spiritual practice.

I. I try to follow certain principles religiously, so to speak.

A. Rigorous honesty. I am scrupulous with others about my data, logic, procedures. In some
sense, when I venture into predictions of how the universe will one day be found to behave, I am
representing humanity, and that is a moral obligation I take seriously but with elation. The more
difficult but equally crucial form of honesty is with myself, regarding the limitations of my, or
anyone's, knowledge. Humility is an essential ingredient in honesty. I am always humble before
the data, aware that theorists like myself can at best suggest interesting hypotheses and determine
what conclusions follow from given hypotheses, while only observations can tell which
hypotheses might be true.

B. Give credit where credit is due. My place in the universe is largely a place in other people's
minds, and I want it to be accurate. By the same token, the role of each of my competitors and
collaborators is a fact of nature, and to misrepresent that is an insult to the idea of science. At a
spiritual level, gratitude is fundamentally a giving of credit where credit is due.

C. Value imagination; be original. This is a vote of confidence in the universe and in God.

II. Commitment.

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Nature does not reveal her secrets easily, and to value those secrets requires a long-term
commitment. It takes many years of schooling and constant study of the literature in one's field,
not to mention teaching and service, to be able to continue research long enough and get enough
support to penetrate even the smallest aspect of nature successfully. Science is a kind of calling
very much like the priesthood, and of course the Medieval physicists were priests.

III. The ultimate goal is to be consciously in tune with the universe.

Much of modern physics and cosmology is counter-intuitive, but after years of working in the
field, we scientists learn to expand our intuition. We have shifted our personal frame of reference
from the common-sense world to the larger universe by believing that what we work on is real. To
believe a theory is a leap of faith. Our theories may be wrong. Under the best of circumstances,
they will be revised or encompassed some day. Nevertheless, they are the best truth of our time.
This shift in emotional frame of reference not only increases our chances of being right by being
original-it can be a path to spiritual fulfillment. The modern cosmologists' quest for the initial
conditions, the composition, and the evolutionary history of the universe is the profoundly
spiritual endeavor to know the universe as it truly is. We certainly don't do it for the money.

IV. I have a constantly reinforced faith in the ability of human beings, including myself, to dip into a
bottomless well of ideas and enthusiasm in order to find what is needed to take the next step. There are
moments when the right idea cascades into the prepared mind from no obvious source, and when that
happens, there is a sense of grace. The search for scientific truth can be subject to guidance as divine as
any other.

Acknowledgments

This essay grew out of my collaboration with my wife, Nancy E. Abrams, on our course "Cosmology and
Culture" and on our book in progress. I am very grateful for her help with it.

References

1. Vaclav Havel, "The need for transcendence in the postmodern world," Futurist, v29, n4 (July-August,
1995), pp. 46ff.

2. Richard Elliott Friedman, The Disappearance of God (Little, Brown, 1995), pp. 230-235.

3. See, e.g., Jeremy Naydler, Temple of the Cosmos (Inner Traditions, 1996).

4. C. S. Lewis, "The Heavens," The Discarded Image (Cambridge University Press, 1967).

5. T. S. Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution (Vintage Books, 1959), esp. pp. 193ff.

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6. John Donne's Poetry, Arthur L. Clements, ed. (W.W. Norton & Co., 1992), p. 102.

7. Blaise Pascal, Pensees, Sec. III, nos. 205-206.

8. Sheldon Glashow, sketch reproduced in T. Ferris, New York Times Magazine, Sept. 26, 1982, p. 38.

9. Joel R. Primack and George. R. Blumenthal, "What is the Dark Matter? Implications for Galaxy
Formation and Particle Physics," in Formation and Evolution of Galaxies and Large Structures in the
Universe, J. Audouze and J. Tran Thanh Van, eds. (Reidel, Dordrecht, 1983), pp. 163-183.

10. Joel R. Primack and Nancy Ellen Abrams, "In a Beginning…Quantum Cosmology and Kabbalah,"
Tikkun, v10, n1 (Jan-Feb, 1995), pp. 66-73.

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