Cosmosis

What I know about cosmology: precisely squat.  Take everything hereafter, therefore, for what it's worth.

This article is surely some of the best, if not the best, writing on cosmology ever.  Lucid, well-paced, a little ecstatic, it's everything writing (on any topic, really) should be.

Another extraordinary source of cosmology-writing (who'd have thought there'd be two?) is John Updike's 1997 novel, Toward the End of Time.  But that book was devastating; it's black and expanding universe was icy and tended fundamentally toward annihilation.  I despaired for weeks after reading it.  Though Updike's prose was as luminous as ever, no mere opalescence can endear to us that great and final wave of oblivion which (the book's cosmology held) is our fate.

But how about this: "Science owes its epistemological gravitas to its stern insistence that every idea faces the firing squad of experiment...That’s the methodology that gifted us the shimmering, intricate, expansive cosmos we live in today."

Or this: "Galaxies were also giving off a special kind of light, a downshifted hue that suggested they were speeding away from Earth."

In this telling, by the science writer Ross Andersen, the cosmos is all wonder and hue, all mystery, interplay, distance, light.  And science is that giddy thing it was for Einstein, who began our century of relativity by wondering what it would be like to ride a beam of light.  Who wouldn't want to live in this realm of elaborate crystalline grace and power?

So what's the lesson?  Hard telling.  Updike wasn't generally a pessimist.  And, though I've never read anything else by Andersen, it seems clear from this article that he's as devoted to rigor and process as he is to dreamy metaphor.  Nor is it a contest.  Rather, in every case, doesn't the lesson have ultimately to do with imagination itself?  As Andersen's article discusses, cosmologists face the problem that they're not yet able to observe our own galaxy (or any other, for that matter) from outside of our galaxy.  And isn't this the problem, in microcosm, of cosmology generally?  Cosmology, precisely because its subject is so comprehensive ("all of space and all of time," as Andersen points out) is fated to measure, more than anything, our ability to imagine a plausible cosmology.