Best Turquoise book I've read (so far!)

I’m on holidays in Bali and my wife couldn’t scrape me off the pool lounge yesterday as I read this book. It’s a superb turquoise adventure. I’d value comments, especially from others who have read this book, or similar works.

Cheers,

Andrew Hollo

Purple to Turquoise: A Review of “The View From the Centre of the Universe” (2006) by Joel R. Primack and Nancy Ellen Abrams.

When I was in my early teens, I had sleepless nights because of a TV documentary about the millions of “invisible” organisms which live in our hair, on our skin, and within our bodies, quite unbeknown to us. I lay awake not because I was frightened, but excited. Magnified tremendously, this broadcast showed them crawling around like dinosaurs, complete with scaly flanks and barbed tentacles. Like most boys of my generation, I was fascinated by the prospect of discovering alien life, yet here was something equally intriguing - and it was real! And right under my nose. Well, under my fingernails when I scratched myself.

What if those organisms, in turn, had similar parasites? And what if they, in turn, did? Scaled in the other direction, what if we humans were blind to the fact that we existed on some giant creature’s epidermis? Which, in turn … well, you get the picture. These ideas lurked and never really congealed into something solid until, yesterday, I read Primack and Abram’s masterful book. “The View from the Center of the Universe” attempts nothing less than a plain English explanation of our place in the cosmos, fusing Primack’s ‘hard science’ astronomy with Abram’s metaphorising to create a compelling Turquoise cosmology: something that builds upon purple’s creation myths, red’s desire for centrality, blue’s insistence on truth, orange’s quantification & testability and green’s yearning for wholeness.

What impressed me most about this book were the way the authors addressed ‘simple’ questions like, “What is a human?” Their answer? “I can trace my lineage back 14 billion years through generations of stars. My atoms were created in stars, blown out in stellar winds or massive explosions, and soared for millions of years through space to become part of a newly forming solar system - my solar system. And back before those creator stars, there was a time when the particles that at this very moment make up my body and brain were mixing in an amorphous cloud of dark matter and quarks. Intimately woven into me are billions of bits of information that had to be encoded and tested and preserved to create me. Billions of years of cosmic evolution have produced me” (p. 281 italics in original)

It’s hard to know to summarise a book I found unputdownable; almost every second page is dog-eared and underlined. Primack and Abrams speak through vivid images, stories and metaphors. Just one of these is the Cosmic Uborubos - picture a circular snake eating its own tail. From tail to fangs are the the 60 orders of magnitude between the smallest subatomic particles and the largest superclusters of galaxies. As humans, we are roughly halfway around and our sensory apparatus is tuned to pick up just a narrow sliver (from a millimetre or so, up to the size of large mountains). This range of 6 or so orders of magnitude are the realm which we consider ‘reality’, where ‘common sense’ works and physical intuition is reliable. The remaining 54 orders of magnitude are only available to us ‘with assistance’: the microscope, the telescope, or mathematics and physics.

What’s any of this got to do with SD? Primack and Abrams offer a Second Tier cosmology which fuses well verified scientific theories like relativity and evolution with those less well tested yet accepted: particle physics (subatomic particles don’t exist per se, they have energy states which generate probability clouds); double dark theory (dark energy and cold dark matter fill 95% of the ‘space’ which most of us imagine is the universe - I always thought it was a vacuum, a nothing), cosmic inflation (an explanation of how we got from the Big Bang to the irregularities which created hundreds of billions of galaxies such as our Milky Way) and the fractal theory of biological scaling (which explains why we humans can’t possibly be a critter on the skin of a larger critter - they’d never be able to evolve a circulatory system large enough).

So far, this sounds like a science book right? Wrong. This is where the partnership between the authors comes in. They’re a husband and wife team who teach a course at the University of California called ‘Cosmology and Culture’. What is a cosmology? It is “a social consensus on how to think about whatever is out there” (p. 19). A bit like memes. Especially v-memes. For example, a tremendously successful purple culture, which we call Ancient Egypt, developed a cosmology based upon multiple non-dogmatic myths, with no requirement for consistency. Monotheistic (blue) religions today continue to offer a view of the universe which many accept today: an omnipotent God, who inhabits some higher sphere, creates earth from the firmament and populates it. The inherent cosmology of most educated Westerners is the materialist (orange) Newtonian model: a sense of ‘cosmic homelessness’ based on a view that we live on a small rock circling an insignificant heap of gas within an immense vacuum punctuated by other similar gaseous clouds and balls of rock. Green cosmologies also exist: they posit a universal ‘energy’ or some intangible (and unprovable) universal harmonic or pulse which we can connect with should we choose to do so.

This is where Primack and Abrams shine: their move to a Second Tier cosmology which binds the scientific with the mythic. The former recognises that we have the ability, increasingly, to quantify, to test and to reason. (Some of the developments in astronomy and physics since I saw that TV documentary as a teenager 30 years ago are almost beyond belief). The latter recognises that we must develop a shared set of stories and meanings which may, one day, enable us to harness our joint efforts in the interests of saving the only planet we know of which has evolved consciousness. In a nutshell, this book’s great contribution is its ability to help us integrate cosmic ideas into our lives. It’s the most readable turquoise book I’ve found yet.

Re: Best Turquoise book I've read (so far!)

This certainly look like a great book,  but I am curious as to why you consider it Turquoise rather than Yellow.  It certainly looks solidly Yellow from the reviews I have seen so far?