From the microscopic to the macroscopic, this is an original and gripping look at the universe and our place in it

Those who remember Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy will recall the Total Perspective Vortex, a device that shows the entire universe (cleverly extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake) to anyone placed inside it. The resulting feeling of complete insignificance is enough to shatter the victim’s mind permanently.

I am pleased to report that this book, which aims to show us our place in the grand scheme of things, will not make you lose your marbles. However it may, to use the parlance of a bygone era, blow your mind a bit. In one four-page period, my marginal notes went from “!” to “!!” to “!!!”

We begin, counter-intuitively, with the microscopic rather than the macroscopic, and 17th-century Dutch tradesman Antonie van Leeuwenhoek cleverly constructing a microscope using a custom-made glass bead as a lens to discover that ponds, sputum, saliva and goodness knows what else all teemed with apparently living creatures, invisible to the naked eye.

This episode is included in the book to give us a sense of perspective, and proportion. Earlier, there was a breakthrough at the opposite end of the scale when Copernicus worked out that it was not the Earth at the centre of the universe, but the sun. The implications of this have been explored pretty thoroughly over the last 500 years, but Caleb Scharf, an astronomer and director of Columbia University’s astrobiology centre (Astrobiology: “the study of the origin, evolution, distribution and future of life in the universe”), has a slant on the subject that is original and gripping.

As I understand it, there is an underlying principle to Copernican astronomy, and that is that we are not as special as we thought we were in ancient times (if we disregard those Greek philosophers who, before Plato and Aristotle laid down the law, proposed not only atoms but a heliocentric system). Later, astronomers worked out the possible, or probable, number of Earth-like planets in the universe, and concluded that it was extremely unlikely that we were the only sentient species out there.

Then again, there is no evidence so far that we are not the only sentient species in the universe. Furthermore, it turns out that we may be quite special after all. For one thing, we have come along at just the right time, and under the right circumstances, to be able to make well-informed observations about the nature of the universe. Had humanity arisen too early, before the cosmic gases had thinned, we wouldn’t have been able to see any but the brightest stars. Had we come along much later, the galaxies would have been pushed beyond the range of all vision – and their stars would be too dimmed for us to see them anyway (the universe, you will be alarmed to hear, is running out of stars).

Also, the solar system itself is not as stable as we used to think it was: there’s a disturbingly large chance that at some point (don’t worry too much, this is many millions of years in the future) some of the inner planets are going to collide. A Mars-Earth collision isn’t hugely likely – but neither is it hugely unlikely.

As I say, this is a mind-expanding book. There’s a notably lovely section in which Scharf imagines how our understanding of the universe would have been affected had the Earth been the moon of a gas giant, or had we been orbiting twin suns: it’s around here that my marginal notes became exclamation marks. It’s written with complete clarity. And you won’t be quite the same after reading it.

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