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THE RED LIMIT. THE SEARCH FOR THE EDGE OF THE UNIVERSE

Timothy Ferris (1977)

This brings us, by a variant route, to a point we have considered before, that we owe our small existence to that of the broad universe. It suggests, in Wheeler’s words, “that there exists a degree of harmony between us and our surroundings that we never realized before. In the past, we looked at our surroundings as if there could be no other, something with which we just had to get along. If this new view is correct, our surroundings are very special and tuned to us, like a plant to its flower: This cycle of the universe like the plant, and we like the flower.” Through all science runs that refrain, that nature is intelligible to us because we in some sense belong to it. The scientist, wrote Einstein, “is astonished to notice how sublime order emerges from what appeared to be chaos.” Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker told his friend Werner Heisenberg, “All our thinking about nature must necessarily move in circles or spirals; for we can only understand nature if we think about her, and we can only think because our brain is built in accordance with nature’s laws.” James Jeans wondered of the galaxies, “Do their colossal incomprehending masses come nearer to representing the main ultimate reality of the universe, or do we? Are we merely part of the same picture as they, or is it possible that we are part of the artist? Are they perchance only a dream, while we are brain-cells in the mind of the dreamer?” “Ultimately,” wrote Mach, “all must form one whole.” To say that nature is comprehensible, that science is not deluding itself, is an assertion of faith—“reason is one of the articles of faith,” said Eddington—but there is nothing wrong in that. After all, we are part of the universe. And the faith of science—that the seamless weave of nature will reveal itself to our reasoned inquiry—that faith is part of the universe too.