Right:
Galaxies (Nasa).
The questions
of the first philosophers 
– Thales of Miletus, Anaximander,
Empedocles… – involved the Universe: what is the Earth’s shape?
Which are the principles, or elements, of things? Why is there
the world, things, and not nothingness?
Before the
Greek philosophers, the Hindus also speculated about the
creation of the universe, and the role of God in it: «Nobody
could ever be able to create the Universe. How could an
immaterial being create what’s material? How could God make the
world, without raw material?»
But in general,
the oldest questions and answers about the Universe, and its
nature and the role of man in it, were fundamentally mythical
and fanciful. Many peoples in the ancient Mediterranean world
saw stars in the moving and shining sky as a sort of transit of
the souls of death, and the ancient Egyptians saw a sort of
platter copying the Nile and the geography of their earthly
world.
These visions
were not very different from the version present in
Shakespeare’s poetry, when he designates the stars as «night
candles», or from
Lord Byron’s when he described the Milky Way as a
«broad and ample road, whose dust is gold, and pavement stars».
The enchanted
and fanciful visions of the Universe began to dry up in the
seventeenth century. In 1690, when Christian Huygens speculated
about the existence of a great number of populated earths, as
beautiful as ours, the subjacent conception had very little to
do with the one present in previous poetry and myths. Huygens
was deeply influenced by the modern visions of the Universe, as
put forward by Kepler, Galileo, and Newton.
Feynman, an
outstanding contemporary physicist, criticizes the incapacity of
today’s poets to write about the strange composition of the
Universe, as revealed by science: «Why do the poets of the
present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of
Jupiter as if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning
sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?», he asks.
The answer to
Feynman’s question is not difficult: the human soul is not
positively impressed by the scientific vision of Jupiter and of
the Universe. The Universe revealed by science is extremely
inhuman. It isn’t easy for poetry to describe it.
Our role in the
Universe, according to a scientific view, is purely accidental
and gratuitous. «Physics have discovered a Universe of rage,
violence and war, with explosions and implosions of stars and
planets, collisions of galaxies, and stars that parasitize and
devour each other cannibalistically» (Edgar Morin).
Science has
revealed that the Universe wasn’t created for us, and that we
have no significant place in it, contrary to our ancestral myths
and religious considerations. The Universe, when seen through
Gamma rays, X rays, infrared, and modern cosmology, has nothing
to do with what our eyes spontaneously detect, and what our
dreams would like it to be.
In the
seventeenth century, Blaise Pascal described the existential
discomfort caused by the revelations of modern science about the
universe. He was astonished and anguished with the first
descriptions of an infinite universe, composed of millions of
stars and planets, making the Earth and man simple microscopic
scraps. From the point of view of a Universe that we can’t help
feeling as cruelly empty of the possibilities of life, crushing,
and unbelievably big, strange and extensive, his thoughts remain
extremely current.
The more recent
elements introduced by science about our origins and nature are
also far from being comfortable for our dreams. In the
nineteenth century,
Charles Darwin revealed to an incredulous
humanity that we are descendants of other species, of apes, and,
even descended from bacteria. In recent decades astrophysics has
revealed that we are also descendants of atoms formed in the
interior of the nuclear power stations of the stars, and ejected
by them into the interstellar vacuum.
When compared
to former mythical or religious visions, and our human dreams,
this scientific vision is indeed uncomfortable. But notice the
way Blaise Pascal expresses his surprise and fright: «When I consider
the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity that
lies before and after it, when I consider the little space I
fill and I see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of
which I am ignorant, and which know me not, I rest frightened,
and astonished, for there is no reason why I should be here
rather than there. Why now rather than then? Who has put me
here? By whose order and direction have this place and time have
been ascribed to me?»
And look at the
way scientist Michel Cassé describes our connection to the
universe, and the fact that we are literally sons of the stars:
« When we drink a drop of water, we drink the Universe, because
a molecule of water, the H2O, gathers in itself the hydrogen – a
vestige of the initial explosion, the Big Bang -, and the
oxygen, produced in the furnace of the stars and exhaled by
them». «When observing the stars, you should see them in other
perspective. Take into account what they really are: the mothers
of the atoms of which we are constituted, the atoms that
constitute the mortal and thinking species that admire the sun
as a god, a father or a nuclear station».
And meditate on the way Edgar Morin describes the dynamic of the
creation of the elements that compose the Universe: «Without
ceasing stars switch off and explode and planets freeze; without
ceasing fragments and dust of dead suns and planets gather,
whirling round over themselves to give birth to new galaxies and
new suns».
Isn’t there
true poetry? Blaise Pascal, Morin, or Cassé may not be poets but when
they described the universe and its mechanisms the way they do,
they wrote and chanted the poetry that Feynman claimed.
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See
also:
Man and the Universe: why are we
here? Why was I born
