Beyond Cosmos
Peppin Kishore
Like our ancestors, we look up at the heavens and wonder. What is the structure of the universe? How significant are we? Are we alone? In Carl Sagan's words, "we are a way for the cosmos to know itself." To commemorate the acquisition of The Seth MacFarlane Collection of the Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan Archive, the Library of Congress presents an exploration of these questions across the breadth of its collections and offers a first glimpse into Carl Sagan's papers.
This section showcases rare books, manuscripts and celestial maps from the Library of Congress collections illustrating the history of modeling the cosmos. Starting with ancient Greek astronomy and following developments in the Islamic world, these essays also highlight the work of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and others. The section continues by exploring Descartes and Newton's development of a mechanical model for the universe, the realization that the stars are suns and ultimately that the Milky Way is one galaxy among many in the universe. The goal of this section is to provide a general overview of the history of our understanding of the universe and offer a view of how our knowledge of nature develops over time.
This section showcases early science fiction books and pop-culture items like sheet music, movie posters and trailers alongside newspaper articles, astronomy books and items from Carl Sagan's papers. Through these materials, the section explores the interplay between imagination and science in how our ideas about life on other worlds have developed over time. Starting with the notion of life on the moon from the 1630s, essays also look at the history of interpreting the geography and alleged canals of Mars. From there, we consider how scientists and science fiction writers imagined civilization on Mars, Americans' persistent belief in UFO's, and our attempts to communicate with extraterrestrials. The primary goal of this section is to illustrate the important connection between imagination and rigorous science and present how our ideas about life in the universe have developed over time.
Primarily showcasing items from The Seth MacFarlane Collection of the Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan Archive this section contextualizes Carl Sagan in the tradition of science. It starts by presenting how Sagan became interested and passionate about the universe as a young child and then follows the development of the depth and breadth of his interests in high school and college. From there it focuses on his connections to mentors like Harold Urey, Gerard Kuiper and Hermann Muller. This section concludes by exploring the many roles Sagan played as a mentor and role model to scientists, science communicators and the public at large.
The goal of this collection is to explore connections between some of Carl Sagan's work, communicating about the cosmos and the possibilities of life on other worlds and the extensive diversity of collections of the Library of Congress. It is a thematic showcase of digitized items from many corners of the collections, brought together with the hope of prompting visitors to expand their knowledge and come to their own understanding by engaging with a range of digitized primary sources. Unlike a physical exhibition, this online presentation is not limited by what can be framed and hung on a wall. Whenever possible, books, manuscripts, radiobroadcast and other materials have been digitized in full. The result is a wealth of material, much of it full-text searchable for visitors to explore.
Given the massive scale of the Seth Macfarlane Collection of the Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan Archive the few hundred items digitized from that collection and presented here in this online collection are a microscopic sliver of this archive's contents. Our hope is that this thematic collection showcases some of the kinds of treasures contained within. For those interested, a finding aid for the collection is located online here.
I fell in love with astronomy and the mysteries of the night sky when my parents enrolled me in a science magnet elementary school. The school was equipped with a basic planetarium, and I remember as a kindergartner wondering, Is that all really up in the sky?
The SMACS 0723 image, containing thousands of galaxies in the deepest reaches of space, was the first image many saw from the James Webb Space Telescope. When I saw it I wondered if God truly is beyond such an image. But when I saw the image of the Carina Nebula (see below), my answer came in the form of a realization: Only God could be behind all of this.
It's one of the most compelling questions you could possibly ask, one that humanity has been asking since basically the beginning of time: What's beyond the known limits? What's past the edge of our maps? The ultimate version of this question is, What lies outside the boundary of the universe?
To answer the question of what's outside the universe, we first need to define exactly what we mean by "universe." If you take it to mean literally all the things that could possibly exist in all of space and time, then there can't be anything outside the universe. Even if you imagine the universe to have some finite size, and you imagine something outside that volume, then whatever is outside also has to be included in the universe.
If the universe is infinite in size, you don't really need to worry about this conundrum. The universe, being all there is, is infinitely big and has no edge, so there's no outside to even talk about.
Oh, sure, there's an outside to our observable patch of the universe. The cosmos is only so old, and light only travels so fast. So, in the history of the universe, we haven't received light from every single galaxy. The current width of the observable universe is about 90 billion light-years. And presumably, beyond that boundary, there's a bunch of other random stars and galaxies.
Cosmologists aren't sure if the universe is infinitely big or just extremely large. To measure the universe, astronomers instead look at its curvature. The geometric curve on large scales of the universe tells us about its overall shape. If the universe is perfectly geometrically flat, then it can be infinite. If it's curved, like Earth's surface, then it has finite volume.
Current observations and measurements of the curvature of the universe indicate that it is almost perfectly flat. You might think this means the universe is infinite. But it's not that simple. Even in the case of a flat universe, the cosmos doesn't have to be infinitely big. Take, for example, the surface of a cylinder. It is geometrically flat, because parallel lines drawn on the surface remain parallel (that's one of the definitions of "flatness"), and yet it has a finite size. The same could be true of the universe: It could be completely flat yet closed in on itself.
But even if the universe is finite, it doesn't necessarily mean there is an edge or an outside. It could be that our three-dimensional universe is embedded in some larger, multidimensional construct. That's perfectly fine and is indeed a part of some exotic models of physics. But currently, we have no way of testing that, and it doesn't really affect the day-to-day operations of the cosmos.
When you imagine the universe, you might think of a giant ball that's filled with stars, galaxies and all sorts of interesting astrophysical objects. You may imagine how it looks from the outside, like an astronaut views Earth from a serene orbit above.
But the universe doesn't need that outside perspective in order to exist. The universe simply is. It is entirely mathematically self-consistent to define a three-dimensional universe without requiring an outside to that universe. When you imagine the universe as a ball floating in the middle of nothing, you're playing a mental trick on yourself that the mathematics does not require.
If all this sounds complicated and confusing, don't worry. The entire point of developing sophisticated mathematics is to have tools that give us the ability to grapple with concepts beyond what we can imagine. And that's one of the powers of modern cosmology: It allows us to study the unimaginable.
My book, "Your Place in the Universe," explores our evolving conception of the cosmos and our place within it, and is a great place to start your own journey. And the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics maintains a FAQ about the universe, which you can find here.
Learn more by listening to the "Ask a Spaceman" podcast, available on iTunes and askaspaceman.com. Ask your own question on Twitter using #AskASpaceman or by following Paul @PaulMattSutter and facebook.com/PaulMattSutter.
Like many of the Christian books I read, I first heard about this book from an interview on the Steve Brown, Etc. podcast. In the interview, Ross explained that our universe exists in several dimensions beyond the four we are familiar with (length, width, depth, and time). Furthermore, additional dimensions exist "outside" our universe, dimensions in which God exists, moves, and works. Ross then went on to explain how some difficult biblical concepts can be given a new perspective through an understanding of these various dimensions. Needless to say, I was fascinated by these ideas and enticed to read the book.
I would describe Beyond The Cosmos as a book divided into three parts, though the author makes no such formal division himself. Together, they act as a funnel, starting with broad concepts and narrowing down to specific examples. The first few chapters lay the groundwork for extra dimensions. After a brief geometry lesson, Ross presents the history of dimensional research, starting in the early 1900s, and Albert Einstein's special and general theories of relativity. He then traces the steps taken to confirm these theories and apply them to the study of our universe, which ultimately led to the fields of quantum physics and string theory research. This research helped formulate a creation model that requires nine spatial dimensions and a one-time dimension, as well as a minimum of one dimension that exists outside our universe. Furthermore, these findings aren't being made by "Crazy Christian scientists pushing an agenda," but by mainstream physicists and astronomers such as Stephen Hawking, Russel A. Hulse, Alexander Vilenkin, John Schwarz, and many others you may or may not have heard of. As might be expected, the book's discussion of this history is brief and is limited to mainly the conclusions, leaving the reader to take the author's word as truth. However, Ross does provide an extensive bibliography and source list for anyone who is interested in additional reading about the specific research and discoveries.
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