Human Universe

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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... 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. An excellent topic, answering big philosophical questions based on the best of our current knowledge. “This book asks questions about our origins, our destiny, and our place in the universe.” What is a human being? Objectively, nothing of consequence. Particles of dust in an infinite arena, present for an instant in eternity. Clumps of atoms in a universe with more galaxies than people. And yet a human being is necessary for the question itself to exist, and the presence of a question in the universe – any question – is the most wonderful thing.

Even the 'Big Bang' (last refuge of the theistic scoundrel) is not merely under assault. Cosmology now makes it a blip amongst uncountable infinite blips. The conditions for life or not come into existence in a complex multiverse in which all things are possible. This is another sumptuous book from Professor Cox in conjunction with the BBC tv series of the same name. The book is full or amazing photographs and articles showing the amazing challenges and how we have excelled over them through the ages - from evolutionary imperatives to pushing the boundaries of our planet. Professor Cox is a very human face to what could be a very dry and antiseptic subject. My only possibly criticism is that the this time round they have chosen such a wide subject with so many possible avenues of study that you wonder who really chose the subject matter and what other details did they leave out (as compared to their other subject matters from previous projects - such as Wonders of the Solar System to Wonders of life). 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.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. Human Universe is first and foremost a love letter to humanity - a celebration of our outrageous fortune in existing at all. Still, this is not the bulk of the book. 95% and certainly the sections on the first four questions contain some of the best science writing currently available. It is highly recommended for that reason. 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. We are insignificant because we are highly vulnerable to the workings of a universe of unpredictable moving parts that does not appreciate our planet-bound biology very much and whose scale is far beyond our imagining except in awesome mathematical and theoretical terms.

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. Here’s another example, and perhaps a better one. We all recognise that domestic dogs are highly intelligent, social creatures. However, we do not regard them as self-aware in the same way that (we think) we are, because they cannot recognise their reflection in a mirror as belonging to them. But this test – the so-called mirror self-recognition test – is biased towards creatures for which vision is the primary sensory modality. Dogs generally have very poor vision, but this is more than compensated for by their sense of smell, which exceeds ours in sensitivity at least a hundredfold. This means that dogs can identify scents much fainter than we can detect, and also distinguish between scents.

We also have stroppy teens saving the world

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. 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. Cox and Cohen do not over-claim for science. They claim for it only what it can do - give us the best framework 'to hand' for understanding what the world is really like out there and what makes us what we are or at least appear to be.