PART ONE
‘In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.’
Carl Jung
The cosmos describes the universe as seen as an ordered whole, as opposed to an amalgam of bewildering chaos. Since the dawn of time our species has sought to make sense of our world and, crucially, how we fit into it. We have utilized different mechanisms to do so, perhaps most notably religious faith and scientific investigation, both of which are considered in the chapter that follows. Yet religion and science have often seemed at odds with each other in this quest. Richard Dawkins, for example, calls faith ‘the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence.’ Others, though, have believed there is space for both. Einstein took a nuanced approach. While rejecting the idea of a personal god, he once wrote: ‘Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible concatenations, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in point of fact, religious.’ That greatest of science communicators, Carl Sagan, meanwhile, summarized our deep fascination with matters of the universe in Cosmos: ‘The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us – there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation of a distant memory, as if we were falling from a great height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries.’
The universe comprises all that may be sensed, measured and detected – although, of course, in actuality we know that the vast majority of it remains unsensed and uncharted. It includes all living things, all physical and celestial objects, atmospheres, galaxies, vacuums and voids, as well as concepts such as space and time.
The idea of a physical universe governed by basic scientific laws (as opposed to the notion of a personal universe the nature of which is subject to individual consciousness) was in circulation among, for example, ancient Chinese, Greek and Indian thinkers. Although the descriptions of its origins and nature were largely speculative, human thought was nonetheless unleashed from the shackles of introspection and localization and directed outwards into the unknown of the cosmos. Man, in other words, could begin to perceive of himself within the ‘Big Picture’.
There have been long-running fundamental debates as to whether the universe is essentially unchanging or in constant flux, whether it is finite, whether time is linear, or not, and if there is other life like us out there. Most of these ‘big questions’ remain up for grabs.
Yet even as the mysteries of the universe abound, we have been able to calculate (although we still lack definitive empirical evidence) its rough age (13.8 billion years) and size (at least 93 billion light years across). We have some understanding of how our own galaxy is organized, how time and space may be bent, how black holes are created, how the Big Bang may have birthed the universe – all immense achievements of intellectual imagination. We have much more to find out, of course, but humanity may never have a bigger idea than that which acknowledged, thousands of years ago, that there is more to the universe than what we can see and feel ourselves.