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    The Copernicus Complex: Our Cosmic Significance in a Universe of Planets and Probabilities
    The Copernicus Complex: Our Cosmic Significance in a Universe of Planets and Probabilities
    The Copernicus Complex: Our Cosmic Significance in a Universe of Planets and Probabilities
    Audiobook9 hours

    The Copernicus Complex: Our Cosmic Significance in a Universe of Planets and Probabilities

    Written by Caleb Scharf

    Narrated by Caleb Scharf

    4.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    The Sunday Times (UK) Best Science Book of 2014
    A Publishers Weekly Top 10 Science Book of Fall 2014
    An NBC News Top Science and Tech Book of 2014
    A Politics & Prose 2014 Staff Pick

    In the sixteenth century, Nicolaus Copernicus dared to go against the establishment by proposing that Earth rotates around the Sun. Having demoted Earth from its unique position in the cosmos to one of mediocrity, Copernicus set in motion a revolution in scientific thought. This perspective has influenced our thinking for centuries. However, recent evidence challenges the Copernican Principle, hinting that we do in fact live in a special place, at a special time, as the product of a chain of unlikely events. But can we be significant if the Sun is still just one of a billion trillion stars in the observable universe? And what if our universe is just one of a multitude of others-a single slice of an infinity of parallel realities?

    In The Copernicus Complex, the renowned astrophysicist Caleb Scharf takes us on a scientific adventure, from tiny microbes within the Earth to distant exoplanets, probability theory, and beyond, arguing that there is a solution to this contradiction, a third way of viewing our place in the cosmos, if we weigh the evidence properly. As Scharf explains, we do occupy an unusual time in a 14-billion-year-old universe, in a somewhat unusual type of solar system surrounded by an ocean of unimaginable planetary diversity: hot Jupiters with orbits of less than a day, planet-size rocks spinning around dead stars, and a wealth of alien super-Earths. Yet life here is built from the most common chemistry in the universe, and we are a snapshot taken from billions of years of biological evolution. Bringing us to the cutting edge of scientific discovery, Scharf shows how the answers to fundamental questions of existence will come from embracing the peculiarity of our circumstance without denying the Copernican vision.

    With characteristic verve, Scharf uses the latest scientific findings to reconsider where we stand in the balance between cosmic significance and mediocrity, order and chaos. Presenting a compelling and bold view of our true status, The Copernicus Complex proposes a way forward in the ultimate quest: determining life's abundance, not just across this universe but across all realities.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Audio
    Release dateSep 9, 2014
    ISBN9781427251978
    Author

    Caleb Scharf

    Caleb Scharf is the director of the Columbia Astrobiology Center. He writes the Life, Unbounded blog for Scientific American; has written for New Scientist, Science, and Nature, among other publications; and has served as a consultant for the Discovery Channel, the Science Channel, The New York Times, and more. Scharf has served as a keynote speaker for the American Museum of Natural History and the Rubin Museum of Art, and is the author of Extrasolar Planets and Astrobiology, winner of the 2011 Chambliss Astronomical Writing Award from the American Astronomical Society. He lives in New York City with his wife and two daughters.

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    • 5/5
      What are we with regard to the universe? Is Earth a rarity? Is it unique? What about life? How common is it? And what of life like us, life that can ponder our place in the universe? In this book, Caleb Scharf offers no answers. What he does instead is summarize what we currently know, or think we know, that may have bearing on such questions, and what more we need to find out to even estimate probabilities. He does venture a few opinions, of course, most of which I found quite well explained and seemingly sensible. This is not a dry, academic tome, or a simple history of scientific discovery. It's written with infectious enthusiasm for the subject and is quite enjoyable.
    • 5/5
      My second book by Scharf, as brilliant and engaging as his "Extrasolar Planets..." Less of a textbook; fewer difficult formula (of 100, I could only solve one.) Lots of info here, like lunar reflectivity, very deceptive; it seems bright to us, but the Moon reflects only about 10% of th light that hits it, "about the same as a lump of coal" (71). Of the Sun, he says: "Thus ends the ten-billion year spree of this one star that we decided to take an interest in" (66).Scharf's book questions the "rarity" of the habitable conditions of Earth.Scharf notes that astronomical time is not human time, and he writes of "a few hundred million years" as if brief--and after a chapter, you agree. "The cosmos ticks to the beat of a different clock" (48)--why, humans arose over only a couple hundred million years. Back 4 billion years, our favorite star produced 30% less energy, but there's evidence the world held water even then. Not clear how.He calls the Newtonian clockwork solar system "The Grand Delusion," title of his second chapter. We can tell from the myriad planetary systems that have been identified since the first in 1992, and the 2nd a in '95. There is a stochastic, random or "chaotic" (mathematically) element in our solar system; and, until the invention of computers, the n-body problem was, as Newton concluded, insoluble. Now hundreds of millions of variables in millions of computations can approximate, say, our solar system in 500 million years. Doesn't look that good. Possible Mercury (most elliptical except Pluto) into Venus, possible Venus into Earth, etc. Besides the revealing cosmology, Scharf writes well: note the gerund in the first quotation, the verb in the second here: "Our planet ..[includes] a later 'veneer' of asteroid impacts. In that explosive peppering...."(61); and 2) "even the length of time our entire species has staggered around on the surface of the Earth..."(105)