Caleb Scharf, British-born astronomer and director of the Columbia Astrobiology Center at
Columbia University, has written a story about our place in this expanding universe of ours. His book, The Copernicus Complex: Our Cosmic Significance in a Universe of Planets and Probabilities, highlights how man's idea of himself and "life" itself has changed over time as sciences peels back more of the mysteries around us.In reviewing the book, The Wall Street Journal writes:
Nicolaus Copernicus is credited with the realization, in the 15th century, that the Earth does not sit at the center of the universe but orbits around the sun. This was a key step in the development of the idea that we do not occupy a special place in the universe and that, by implication, there may be nothing special about us, cosmically speaking. In the late 20th century, this led to the “principle of terrestrial mediocrity,” which says that our place in the universe is so ordinary as to be typical—that we live on an ordinary planet, orbiting an ordinary star, in an ordinary galaxy. Caleb Scharf argues that this approach, which he calls the “Copernicus complex,” has gone too far. The Earth, he says, is a rather unusual planet, situated in a rather unusual location.London's The Guardian writes:
Forget the tricksy parenthesis in the subtitle. Skip past an early tendency to label scientists as budding, and science as cutting-edge. This book expands, like spacetime itself, from a very small point. It begins with the microscope pioneer Antony van Leeuwenhoek's famous discovery in Delft in 1674 of a microcosm in a drop of lake water, and it ends with speculation about a lonely civilisation, 100bn years on, in a freezing vacuum that no longer contains information about anything. Books such as these remind us that we are lucky to be here at all, and even luckier to be here now.
