Human Universe

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Dogs can presumably recognise their own scents and tell them apart from the scents of other dogs as readily as we’d recognise our reflection in a mirror. Would we humans pass for self-aware, based on scent alone? I think not. Neither, then, should we judge the abilities of other animals by own own, unique, species-specific standards. A brief explanation on how the laws of nature allow for human beings to exist. “The Standard Model of particle physics is a theory that explains the interactions between subatomic particles in the form of the strong, weak and electromagnetic forces.” “General Relativity and the Standard Model are the rules of the game. They contain all our knowledge of the way that nature behaves at the most fundamental level.” It’s this – the assertion of the uniqueness that makes us special – that really gets up my nose, because it’s a tautology and therefore meaningless. Giraffes are unique at doing what they do. So are bumble-bees, quokkas, binturongs, bougainvillea, begonias and bandicoots. Each species is unique by virtue of its own attributes – that’s rather the point of being a species – and human beings are just one species among many. To posit humans as something extra-special in some qualitative way is called human exceptionalism, and this is invariably coloured by subjectivity. Of course we think we’re special, because it’s we who are awarding the prizes. The authors present almost everything they offer us in an uncompromisingly scientifically-based way. They lapse rarely, for example by simply asserting in a few sentences the 'threat of climate change' - either they know and can explain or they cannot.

One gets the impression that the expansion of the TV format fell apart here because Cox wanted to lobby for investment in the asteroid impact space programme. This is where the bulk of the irritating posturing noted in the first paragraph appears. To Ethiopia then, to meet some primates who weren’t sent to space, and will almost certainly never get there. Geladas, distant ancestors of ours, once one of Africa’s most successful primates, now found in one remote place above the Rift Valley. They live in big groups, and have a range of vocalisations. But it’s hardly space travel is it? Or even language. Duh, dumb-ass geladas. This book asks questions about our origins, our destiny, and our place in the universe. We have no right to expect answers; we have no right to even ask. But ask and wonder we do. The science method applied. “It is scientific only to say what is more likely and what less likely, and not to be proving all the time the possible and impossible.” Apart from their too pat dismissal (contradicted by some of the data in the rest of the book) of the likelihood of our aloneness as emergent consciousness, there is nothing to argue with in their general conclusions - they have science at its best on their side.They give brief explanations and then embed the complexity in a narrative that tells us what the science actually means and challenges us to challenge it. But the hidden sub-text of the work is not just scientific but cultural. Science supposedly got out of this hubristic habit in the 1970s when a new philosophy of classification called “cladistics” was adopted, which sought to discover how species were related to one another without reference to the ancestry of any one species from any other one species. The reasoning is clear. Because it’s a fair assumption that all life descends through evolution from a common ancestor, one can safely assume that any species is a cousin in some degree of any other species, and that it’s possible to get a measure of the degree to which they are related. This book is based on its namesake BBC documentary, Human Universe. If you did not see it yet, you should – totally worth it; the others in the series too. Brian Cox does an amazing job presenting it – his enthusiasm and joy are written all over his face and you can hear it also in his voice. Part of that excitement is present here, in the book, too.

This book explains reality through the examination of five ambitious questions: Where are we? Are we alone? Who are we? Why are we here? And what is our future? Through the use of interesting stories and simply explained complex scientific principles, Brian Cox provides answers to these questions. The book is certainly a relative of Carl Sagan's Cosmos (and, like Cosmos, it is based on a TV series by the same name). Like Cosmos, this book examines the history of the universe in an inviting and entertaining way. This book based on a BBC programme is one of the best popular science books I have read,it gives a very readable unified cosmic vission of almost all,the universo,its origens,the fundamental laws of nature,the emergence of life,the emergence of inteligence,the fine tuning,if we are alone etc...

We also have stroppy teens saving the world

So how did it happen, that the geladas were left sulking in a corner of Africa, while we went on to colonise the world, and beyond? It’s a story and a journey that continues in Ethiopia, where, more than 250,000 years ago, early humans first made tools that might look simple now, but required collaborative working and the passing on of information and language, in the same way as the International Space Station does … This highly probabilistic approach based on rational questioning of available hard evidence and using mathematics as a predictive tool is now giving us a vastly speeded up re-evaluation of our place in the universe to those prepared to listen to what is being said. In the final episode of the series, Professor Brian Cox explores the future of our home planet, its unfolding relationship with the rest of the universe, and its effect on our destiny as a species.

Accelerating then, through our ancestors, with bigger and bigger brains – increases that coincided with periods when the Earth’s orbit was at its most elliptical and the climate most volatile. Ah, you see it’s impossible to separate us from the cosmos, we’re all tied up together and it all comes down to physics in the end. He does manage to find a very big number, too, in his own head, and yours: 80bn neurons in our brains. It's a really uplifting and engaging read, peppered with some punchy moments, such as why we pay footballers more money in a year, than it would cost to observe for known asteroids that WILL at some point hit the earth. Priorities people!? Cox reasons that we exist in an infinite number of galaxies in an infinite number of universes, which makes us both incredibly special as a species but also extremely rare. He marvels at the wonder of man, of what we can achieve.In the words of Georges Lemaître, ‘Standing on a well-cooled cinder we see the slow fading of the suns and we try to recall the vanished brilliance of the origin of the worlds.’ Our cinder is not special; it is insignificant in size; one world amongst billions in one galaxy amongst trillions. But it has been a tremendous ascent into insignificance because, by the virtuous combination of observation and thought, we have been able to discover our place. How Giordano Bruno would have loved what we found.